By Henning Rehder
Everyone in the business community has heard of VoIP.
VoIP stands for Voice over Internet Protocol – a fancy way of saying that you can use a special phone to make phone calls over the Internet. Almost every traditional phone service provider has now implemented a “Hosted VoIP” model. These companies provide you with a special IP phone that is preconfigured for their services and charge you a monthly fee per phone to make unlimited calls. Typically, this monthly fee is in the $25-$35 range per phone. This phone connects over the Internet to their phone servers allowing you have the functions of a large phone system (like auto attendants, follow me, unified communications, and others) without the large phone system price. This has become very popular and it is to the point where small companies are popping up all over providing hosted VoIP and traditional phone carriers (AT&T, SBC, Verizon, Sprint, and others) are buying up the small companies to gain as much market share as they can. The situation is almost to the point where instead of signing up on the Internet for hosted VoIP – you might soon find that every company you purchase IT services from wants to sell you a hosted VoIP solution (either a major provider, or worse – their own “home brewed” solution)
I want to make sure I am clear, however. Hosted VoIP is an excellent product for small businesses. It is simple to understand, implement, and support. You can do things that you could never do with your “traditional” phone. For example, with Hosted VoIP, you can unplug your phone from the office, plug it in at home, and you will receive all your calls and voicemails, just as if the phone was in your office. Additionally, its price point makes it very affordable for small offices and small businesses. With such an easily used technology, it is no wonder why so many companies are trying to sell Hosted VoIP.
There are, however, several major problems that the Hosted VoIP companies won’t tell you about.
- Sound Quality – IP Phones work by breaking up a phone call into data chunks called “Packets”. These packets are sent over the Internet without any kind of guarantee that they will get there in a timely fashion. Additionally, they are sent in a stream, but the stream isn’t monitored for quality. What usually happens with VoIP calls is that they experience small delays in the stream (a problem known as “Jitter”) which causes the phone call’s audio to sound “broken up”. The audio quality will fluctuate based on traffic through your Internet connection as well as general congestion on the Internet itself between you and your VoIP provider.
- Dropped Calls – The delivery of data on the Internet is very inconsistent at times. Sometimes this will cause extreme delays that the VoIP server ultimately can’t compensate for and the call is dropped. This is very similar to what happens when your cell phone drops a call. As anyone who has had their cell phone drop a call in the middle of a conversation, this problem is very frustrating and unprofessional.
- Call quality can NEVER be guaranteed over the Internet – The one problem that VoIP companies fail to inform customers about is that call quality and reliability can’t be GUARANTEED over the Internet. By design, voice traffic on the Internet is treated the same as any other data (such as web browsing traffic). Essentially, the voice traffic “gets there when it gets there”.
- Price – As a company purchases more and more VoIP phone service, the monthly fees start adding up. Even with unlimited phone calls, the monthly costs get out of hand quickly. Most employees don’t make a large number of inbound or outbound calls to justify the cost, except to each other, unless you are in a call center environment. At an average price of $25/phone/month, you can see that an office with 20 phones would pay $500/month for their phones.
- Infrastructure – As more phones are added, the required Internet bandwidth goes up as well. There are two parameters for VoIP calls that must be balanced in order to provide the best functionality: voice quality and bandwidth. To decrease the amount of bandwidth VoIP calls consume, you must change the Codec that is used to encode the voice. For example, most IP Phones in the US support the G.711 codec – which translates each voice call into a data stream of 100Kbps. Additionally, remember that EVERY call (including station to station calls) goes over your Internet connection – so if you have 30 people, with 20 phones with a G.711 codec that would mean you would need a dedicated 2Mbps (in both directions) for voice. This requirement goes up the more phones you add, and thus you must spend more money on your Internet connection
- DTMF Issues – With so many changes in telephone technology, one of the traditional features actually becomes somewhat of a headache. That feature is what is known as DTMF. DTMF are the tones you hear when you press a number on a phones keypad (usually to select an option in a voice menu. In traditional phone calls, these tones are sent as part of the audio of the call. However, in VoIP phone calls, this audio stream is somewhat unreliable
- Emergency / 911 Issues – One other thing people take for granted with their standard home phones is the ability to dial 911 or emergency calls and have the operator know where you are to send emergency vehicles too. By design, the regular old-style phone lines in homes and offices, have a number and address associated with them. When 911 is called from that line, that number and address shows up on the 911 operator’s screen so even if the caller is unable to speak, they can dispatch emergency personnel to that location. With VoIP phones – you could bring the phone anywhere and make phone calls from that location. For example, if the number that is sent to the phone company as caller ID is from the corporate office lines in New York, and you dial 911 from your VoIP phone in Los Angeles, it is very likely that the 911 operator will be sending emergency personnel to the New York corporate office. There are workarounds, but they do involve custom programming outbound caller ID for each phone – which again becomes impractical the more phones you get.
So – the question really is what to do about these issues if you want the benefits of VoIP with as few of the above listed issues? Contrary to common knowledge, increasing the speed of your Internet connection will actually do very little to help these issues as they are a result of Internet-related problems, not the speed of the connection. However, there are several potential solutions:
- Do Nothing – If you are a small office with very little chance of growing, you may want to consider that the benefits of Hosted VoIP outweigh the drawbacks. If you can accept the issues that do occur and the frequency with which they occur, this may be your best solution.
- Work with your provider – VoIP providers do know of these issues and you can spend time on the phone with technical support to work out these issues with them.
- Start small and change as you grow – There are several IP Telephony consultants that can convert your phones from a Hosted VoIP system to an onsite IP PBX in a process known as VoIP Conversion. In this process, your IP phones are configured to work with the new IP PBX and the programming of the PBX is set up to match your previous Hosted VoIP system. This process will reduce your monthly bill to only the cost of the phone lines for the PBX and the actual cost of calls you make to people outside your office.
As you can see, Hosted VoIP is not without its benefits, but unlike the Hosted VoIP companies will have you believe, VoIP is also not without its issues.