So you’re interested in a VoIP service? Do you know what you’re really getting? (Pt. 1)

Laura Schaffer is a Voice Services Consultant for Phonebooth. This is her first contribution to the Phonebooth Blog. This post is the first of a two part series about VoIP phone service for business.

Voice quality and reliability are two of our strongest assets as a business phone system provider. Here’s a bit of a run down explaining what makes (or breaks) voice quality with VoIP, and why your voice on Phonebooth sounds so darn good.

 

It’s all software to me.

To cut to the point, VoIP hosted PBX systems on the surface are all simply software. The same technology you’d use to play a video game. But here’s the rub: video games, and software alone don’t give you a dial tone and can’t conduct, route or deliver a call. So, a question many people don’t even think to ask when getting a hosted PBX system is: what exactly powers that software?

The answer is sometimes bizarre, other times relatively disastrous. The fact is that a smart tech savvy person can build a VoIP software system from an off the shelf product in a matter of weeks, but dial tone and quality are another thing entirely.

The power is in the network.

Unfortunately, some hosted PBX software companies still eschew networks entirely and try to route calls through a data server. This is when crashes happen and where your calls might have collision with other data packets (causing dropped calls, awkward routing). This tends to be the most problematic kind of “infrastructure.”

Renting a network can cause night terrors.

Another option, which is better, is that the company rents or pays for the use of a part of another company’s network. There are a very limited number of networks in existence, as they are in and of themselves very difficult to create and require a great deal of expansion beyond the hosted product – they are, thus, quite expensive.

Since the company that provides your service has to pay for every call you make on some other network, they will, in some way, pass that cost along to you – their customer. And you are left with the bill and the reliability of whatever part of the network that your provider is paying for. So if that portion of the network goes down, all of the provider’s customers, including you, are out of luck.

Reliability is a business necessity, no matter what business you’re in.

We saw what was going on in the industry and, as a company, we wanted to be better than the rest and provide a stable product offering. We’re unique in the hosted VoIP world because we didn’t start with VoIP – we grew our business by providing SIP trunks and offering wholesale capabilities on the nationwide network that we built.

Along the way, it occurred to us that, hey, a lot of these VoIP companies seek us out (and in fact, still do) to run their service on parts of our network – why don’t we build our own VoIP product?

• We’d be able to make a product with more reliable voice quality since we are directly connected to our network.
• We’d be able to offer it at a fraction of the cost due to owner economics.
• And we’d be able to give our customers access to the whole VoIP network, in over 300 markets around the U.S.

And so we created Phonebooth to make the VoIP industry a better place yet disrupt the status quo.

 

 

Image credit: Christopher Macsurak