Possible VoIP issues

If configured properly, your business-grade VoIP service will provide excellent quality phone calls at much cheaper rates than a conventional phone service. If your VoIP system is not set-up properly, you will probably be very disappointed.

Also, apart from voice quality issues, most reliability problems with VoIP are caused internally. eg. faults with the businesses own network (LAN), the modem connection to their broadband/WAN, local power failures.

Quality of Service (QoS)

If your business relies totally on VoIP, your broadband and network is not only used to access other computers on your network, databases, files, email and the Internet, but it is also used for your voice communications.

Voice packets will now be competing with data packets and everything else on your network.

VoIP service providers compress voice packets at many different rates (called Codecs). Higher compression ratios allow them to cram more voice traffic through their systems. Usually, the cheaper the VoIP service, the more compression is used - resulting in poor quality voice calls.

To be successfully implemented and to maintain voice quality, true business-grade IP Telephony requires a number of essential elements ...

• Your broadband should be a high-performance, dedicated, business-grade broadband connection that is not effected by surrounding internet traffic (normal broadband is not dedicated and will not usually provide good QoS).
• If combining both voice and data, your broadband should be capable of providing enough bandwidth for all of your voice and data traffic needs.
• Your VoIP service provider's codecs should match the capabilities of your phone equipment - and vice-versa.
• Your VoIP service provider should be able to provide the right technology, infrastructure and equipment to provide reliable 'Quality of Service' (QoS) and high quality voice communication.
• If required, the ability to integrate with your existing phone system.

Network failure

Alltel SmartConnect does not use a normal broadband connection. It uses a dedicated, business-grade broadband connection that is considered to be as reliable as a normal phone line.

Because your phone services now come through your office network, problems with your internal network may also cause problems with the office phone connections &/or system.

Network Lag

To maintain voice quality across the network, priority is given to voice traffic. This means that when your voice traffic is heavy, less bandwidth is allocated to data traffic. Under these conditions, internet browsing etc may sometimes appear to be slightly slower.

Power Failures

If the power goes out in your local area, then normal/existing PBX phone systems, computer networks and broadband modems will usually be affected.

Regardless of whether you use existing PSTN phones/PBX or a VoIP Telephony system, the simplest way to overcome power failure problems is to install an adequate UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply) backup to keep the phone system (and computer network if required) up and running in the event of localised power failure.