Voice over Internet Protocol (VOIP) technology has changed the way that businesses communicate for the better, but there is always room for improvement. Many businesses can more into greater flexibility with almost and standard, big box VOIP system, but there are some problems to keep an eye on and improvement plans to queue up as needed. Here are a few VOIP planning points to make sure your business is able to grow while keeping communications on point.

Balancing VOIP And All Other Traffic

VOIP technology is basically a customer of your general internet connection. Like all other tasks on the network, VOIP needs to request a set amount of network resources called bandwidth in order to perform its duties.

Unlike many other systems that require bandwidth, VOIP has a few specific needs because of problems that are a lot more noticeable than unnoticeable levels of slow performance. When information is slow with VOIP, you'll notice through both delayed responses and changes in the call audio.

If you've ever heard "robotic" voices that seem to be digitized and grainy like a voice vibrating against metal, it's because the data that makes up your audio information has been delayed or corrupted in some way.

There will always be some level of loss, but there are acceptable levels that match up with expected quality. Unplanned loss comes from not only network problems that plague all network tasks, but from competing with other tasks that need information at the same time.

Load Balancing Is Necessary For VOIP Progress

To make VOIP work as intended, load balancing and quality of service (QoS) is necessary. Network traffic that comes from and goes to VOIP systems can't be interrupted by other services.

In terms of network priority, VOIP is one of the most important tasks. Don't make the mistake of determining business or life importance of sending certain emails or checking certain websites as the most vital tasks; these issues have nothing to do with the network engineering side of things. There are other ways to make sure that certain tasks are able to preempt other taks, and the VOIP load balancing has nothing to do with the business management side of the discussion.

Quality of Service (QoS) is the first level of protecting VOIP systems. This makes sure that a fair amount of bandwidth is available for specific systems, including VOIP.  QoS settings can be part of a pre-built router system and configuring by experienced computer users, but the settings are sometimes generic to the point of wasting network resources just to protect certain services.

Load-balancing hardware does a bit of a better job because the balancers are dedicated to managing specific data routing information related to keeping information safe and efficient. They also act as buffers against certain network attacks or higher than expected network demand by acting as a spillover container.

Contact a VOIP professional to discuss configuring business voice technology for every part of the small business to enterprise scale.