If you are using a VoIP phone system, there is a good chance you have experienced poor call quality. The internet can be used for many purposes such as Email, Web surfing, watching videos and of course communication by either voice or video. It’s important to understand that each of these end to end communications require different considerations. Voice is a type of data transmission that is very delicate and if not handled in the right way can cause issues and degraded call quality. This article discusses the causes of VoIP call quality problems and what you can do to correct them.

The causes of poor quality VoIP calls are easy to diagnose and correct. Your VoIP Service Provider should be able to identify and work with you to correct these problems. More importantly, these problems should not be ongoing. If your VoIP Service Provider is unable to correct your call quality problems, you need to find a different provider.

Common causes of poor VoIP call quality

Poor Internet Connection

If you are constantly experiencing issues with your VoIP telephone service then you might want to start looking at your Internet service provider. Most ISP’s are designed for web surfing and do not offer services to handle VoIP traffic differently. Transporting voice packets is different and requires an additional set of internet protocols that your ISP may not be providing. To solve this issue of poor quality or calls dropping you may want `to upgrade your internet connection so you have more bandwidth. Fortunately, most of the ISP’s, including cable and DSL high-speed internet providers offer business-class high-speed internet service that is acceptable.

Latency issues

VoIP delay or latency is characterised as the amount of time it takes for speech to exit the speaker’s mouth and reach the listener’s ear and can sound like an echo. Voice delays of 50ms or less are recommended. Latency greater than 50ms is noticeable and will affect call quality.  Prioritising VoIP traffic over the network can resolve latency issues. This is where you can put in place a policy to give a higher priority to voice traffic. A quality VoIP router that has the ability to better handle this traffic can solve many of these issues and will result in business quality Business VoIP Phone Service.

Jitter

If the calls are hard to hear or crackly sounding, the issue might be a jitter.  Jitter is a common problem of connectionless networks or packet-switched networks. Because voice traffic is divided into packets, each packet can travel by a different path from the sender to the receiver. When packets arrive at their intended destination in a different order than they were originally sent, the result is a call with poor or scrambled audio.

Jitter is technically the measure of the variability over time of the latency across a network. Jitter is one of the most common VoIP call quality problems. Your phone service or the Internet service provider is the main culprit here. Network congestion, poor traffic prioritisation, and network configuration errors are the main causes of jitters. To solve this issue you have to increase your bandwidth, give priority to voice calls or resolve hardware incompatibilities.

Poorly configured network or Inadequate router

If you are new to VoIP you will need to put in the extra work that is required to look after the higher quality demands of VoIP communications. If your company decides to route both voice and data over the same network without properly configuring your network for VoIP traffic, you can expect to have call quality issues. Configuring your network equipment to handle VoIP traffic better is the first place to start. You might even find your router may not have the options you are after to help with this configuration. A Business VoIP capable router that is properly configured will generally solve the problem.