There is no nice way to put this, but certain national Hosted VoIP providers are giving the
industry a bad name. There are countless examples of businesses who are experiencing poor voice quality with these providers and receive the standard recommendation to increase their internet bandwidth. This solution costs more money and isn’t always the best advice.
The fact of the matter is that VoIP calls do not take much bandwidth, less than 80kb per call. However, because voice and data packets are sharing the same connection, there is always an opportunity for voice packets to be interrupted by data packets. Expanding bandwidth doesn’t always take care of the problem.
One of sipVine’s biggest differentiators in the market is that we believe that call quality is best controlled on the customer’s network. We provide a router or a transparent bridge that has Quality of Service programming built in, ensuring your voice calls have priority. This allows your business to right size the amount of bandwidth to match the needs of the business and not overbuild just for VoIP.
Certainly, there are occasions where the amount of data activity is over-saturating the internet bandwidth. In those situations, QoS will not be able to work as well as it should and the bandwidth will need to be addressed. However, we are bringing businesses on to our platform on daily bases that have experienced this poor advice from a national hosted VoIP provider. In addition to providing a localized QoS device, we have helped our customers troubleshoot issues with their internet circuit to find the root cause of the call quality concerns. This has saved them from blindly adding bandwidth, thus saving them dollars on a monthly basis.
To learn more, check out our whitepaper, Voice Quality: The Ultimate Differentiator in VoIP Providers.
About the author: Mark Greim is the Vice President of Sales and Marketing at sipVine, a provider of a variety of VoIP phone solutions and services. Mark has extensive experience working for start-up or entrepreneurial organizations and has a passion for affordable, reliable, and purposeful technology solutions in those environments.
