Potential Problems with VOIP
The original Internet idea was developed by the US military to provide a very resilient method of ensuring communications between many points with a high chance of survivability in the event of a nuclear war.
One of the trade offs this entailed however was the sacrifice of any predictability over information arriving at a point within a set period of time.
In normal circumstances (ie web traffic) this really doesn’t matter – nobody cares if a piece of information (a packet) arrives in 10 or in 50 milliseconds. With voice packets, however, it’s obvious that conversations with long gaps and missing information become rather difficult for all parties involved.
As a result of this, technology has been developed that prioritises voice packets over other types of traffic in a network. This is called QOS (Quality of Service) or COS (Class of Service).
Unfortunately at present there are very few public networks (such as the Internet) or ADSL networks that support QOS and COS so voice has to take its chances along with all other types of traffic. This can (and often does) result in poor quality.
To better understand this, picture a motorway with 3 lanes where lorries can go in every lane. Traffic would slow down to the speed of the slowest vehicle in each lane. This is why we have a fast lane for cars only. This significantly increases the performance of the motorway network for people in those types of vehicles and is essentially an example of QOS or COS.
At Chess we want to deliver a VoIP solution for you business that doesn't have you tearing your hair our at crackly lines. This is why we have taken time to invest in the technology to deal with this problem and offer a business VoIP solution on which we can offer performance guarantees.
Email a SMARTER Business VoIP expert or call 0800 019 8900