cutting costs on mulitple home phone lines

Voice Over IP (VOIP) has made telecommunications much more powerful and convenient for many homes and businesses, but to be done efficiently you'll need the assistance of a skilled voice service technician. To understand the unique needs of voice services and how they pertain to your network performance.

Why Does Network Performance Matter For VOIP?

VOIP is the concept of converting spoken voice (or any sound) from real audio (analog) to digital format. When you speak into a phone or headset, your voice is converted in real time, then sent through a set of instructions designed to compress the sound into a package small enough to be sent efficiently, but with enough quality to be heard and appreciated.

These instructions are called codecs, and number in the thousands. There are many different techniques and formats for getting just the right file size while maintaining the proper quality. Some codecs may ignore quality for speed of transfer with smaller voice file sizes while others may try to get as robust a voice as possible. Many codecs seeking market dominance or technology community acceptance try to achieve the best of both worlds. 

Your Internet connection (or even just your internal network) plays a huge role on how these codecs work and how high the voice quality is. Poor Internet connections need codecs with lower file sizes, while people seeking the highest quality possible will seek Internet upgrades.

The exact speeds needed to support a particular quality isn't difficult to figure out, but to avoid overpaying your Internet Service Provider, it's best to leave the measurement to the voice service technician.

Voice service is often coupled with video teleconferences as well. Since it all travels across the same Internet connection and is often attached to the same package, you should see if your network can support video calls. There are specific codecs that govern video and audio quality as well, with similar speed versus quality decisions that affect video quality and delay.

Maintaining The Rest Of Your Network Needs

Voice services can be looked at like any other download on the Internet. 'Downloading' isn't just click on links to download a specific file; everything from voice communications over the Internet to browsing the web or watching online videos consumes network resources. Your voice services represent another source of resource consumption, so plan accordingly.

You'll need more Internet capacity than the bare minimum to manage the voice services. With the voice service technician's measurements, you can discover how much you and the other users on the network consume on average.

In addition to planning for higher capacity, a voice services technician can configure your network to share the resources more efficiently. Websites and downloads simply slow down when competing for Internet, but since VOIP communications can lose quality or be lost completely when the network is slow, you'll need to give voice services a higher priority. This can be done without completely starving your other Internet tasks through allowing the voice service technician to configure your router.

Contact a voice service technician to begin planning for quality communications without ruining your network performance.

Talk to experts like Phone Masters Ltd for more information.