The Internet - Just how good is it?
Putting your voice over the Internet is a good idea. You can chat with your friends, colleagues, etc. and not have to pay a penny for it, but how often have you visited a web page and it’s failed to load, or loaded very slowly because someone on the same network was playing a game, or had an email delayed because there has been a problem with the server, and so on …
Exactly the same can happen to VoIP. Data packets can be lost on the Internet, duplicated, or even arrive in a different order that they were sent in! Networks can be overloaded and slow, and the activities of others on your part of the network can dramatically affect your VoIP performance.
Unfortunately, once your data is out on the global Internet, there is very little, if anything you can do to influence it’s transit from one point to another. You can take steps at your local side of things though. You can use a broadband router which has “Quality of Service” (QoS) and/or traffic shaping functionality which will help, but it’s not perfect.
Fortunately, in practice voice over the Internet does work well, and most of the time it work exeptionally well! but, unless you can control every step of the network from start to finish, you will never be able to guarantee the quality of VoIP.
BT’s 21st century network is a big private IP network, and because they own it, they can control it and guarantee that there will always be bandwidth available to place calls, but the global Internet isn’t owned by any one person and various people have various ideas about how they want to run and control their part of the Internet and there is very little you can do to influence that.
There’s worse to come: Some big telephone companies also own parts of the Internet and they may see VoIP as being a competitor to their own telephony business, so they might deliberately block or otherwise disrupt VoIP traffic flowing over their part of the Internet! Some governments have stepped in and said that VoIP is illegal in their country (for various reasons, e.g. because they own the telephone company!) So until all the political and social barriers have been brought down, VoIP over the global Internet is never going to be as reliable as PSTN connectivity.
However, as mentioned above, VoIP does work over the Internet, and most of the time it works very well indeed!
One thing that’s absolutely critical to making VoIP work is choosing the right ISP for your broadband connection. In the UK, we have a choice of over 100 ISPs who can use the BT Wholesale system, sadly only one cable operator, and a handful of “LLU” ISPs (Local Loop Unbundled), who have their own equpment in BT exchanges. The LLU ISPs may seem like a good idea, but they have only placed their equipment in exchanges which they see as profitable for them. This essentially means urban locations rather than rural ones.
The one mantra to rememberer is this: Pick two of these three: Speed, Reliability, Cost. You can only have 2, never all three. The opinion of Drogon Systems is to go for Reliability first, Speed second and Cost third. Other factors to consider for your Internet connection: What happens if it goes wrong? Will you be talking to someone local to you, or in a remote call centre half way round the world?
If your business depends on Internet connectivity, then get a good business quality ISP.
Is this good enough to base your business on? That’s something you have to decide. The opinion of Drogon Systems is that VoIP is perfect to contact colleagues, work from home, connect offices together and make a small number of direct VoIP to PSTN calls, but there is currently no substitute for the PSTN, and if you need to use the telephone in a business critical manner then use the PSTN, or setup some dedicated networking systems to enable you to use external VoIP to PSTN termination services in as efficient a manner as possible. (For example, a 2nd, dedicated ADSL line to a good quality ISP just for VoIP traffic to a UK based termination service)
