Wireless Broadband + VoIP = Problems |
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| Written by Rick Winkler | |
| Tuesday, 25 March 2008 | |
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In today’s business market, watching every penny is common place. This is especially true when it comes to the small business market. Many of our customers scrutinize every bill in order to save money. One technology that can drastically reduce your monthly expenditures is Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP). VoIP can allow you to place telephone calls using your internet connection. The main advantage to using the internet to place telephone calls is that many service plans exist that allow unlimited calling including long distance for a flat rate. There are, however, many things that have to be considered when using VoIP, especially for a business. Most of the problems we encounter are caused by the customer’s internet connection. There are two primary factors that affect voice traffic over the internet: the amount of data that can be sent (bandwidth), and how long that data takes to get from Point A to Point B (latency). Latency causes most problems in situations we encounter. If it takes too long for the signal to travel from one end to the other on a VoIP phone call, then the call experience will degrade. Most of us have experienced a similar problem with cellular phones in a bad reception area. So how does wireless internet affect VoIP? Wireless internet (Clearwire, Cellular Internet, etc) typically has a much higher latency than wired internet (DSL, Cable Internet, etc). This means that more often than not, call quality will suffer. Let me give you an example: A business customer of ours was using Clearwire for internet access which is a wireless broadband provider. The customer was using their cellular phone as their primary means of communication and decided to switch to Vonage in order to reduce the monthly cellular bill. Many weird issues began to occur, all related to latency, and the service was unusable. The fix for the problem was to have the local phone company install a traditional phone line. This is why we still recommend that our business customers use a traditional phone line into their business. In the business world, telephone reliability is typically much more important than the amount saved by placing phone calls over the internet. For home use, some reliability can be sacrificed to justify the cost savings. The bottom line is that traditional telephone lines are still much more reliable than VoIP across the internet, and when it comes to small business, that reliability is critical. |