In my time operating a telecommunications company in South Africa I’ve seen and heard some pretty ridiculous things. Especially when it comes to Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP). While I will admit that VoIP doesn’t always work as expected there are usually some key determining factors at play and they are almost always the same culprits. They are also almost always manageable and fixable.
What I want to talk about here however are some of the most common reasons why people object to migrating to or buying a VoIP system. Although some of these may have once held true I am pretty confident that the technology today far outperform its analog predecessor in every possible way. In-fact, not only does it outperform it, it is now possible to do much more with VoIP than analog telephony would have ever made possible. (I’ll get into that in a different article)
So, without further adue, here they are in no particular order of-course.
- VoIP is expensive
- It is unreliable
- It has problems with poor call quality
- It’s still a new technology that isn’t widely used
- You can’t keep your landline number
Let’s dig in and see why this isn’t true.
VoIP is expensive
I remember, only a few short years ago when we started selling VoIP, Telkom at the time had a VoIP product available. The call rates were incredibly expensive and I am sure that only a handfull of businesses made use of that service. At that time they were still heavily reliant on their copper infrastructure to generate revenue and for the most part, they didn’t have much competition in that market space. VoIP was basically their alternative offering to clients who did not have access to copper infrastructure. (Yeah, that is possible)
Today however, things have changed drastically. The industry is more competitive than ever before and the sale of VoIP services is no longer limited to only licensed telcos. The electronic communications act (ECA) makes provision for license exempted I.T. providers to on-sell VoIP- and Internet services from companies who are licensed. This provision has allowed the telecommunication industry to change quite drastically. Today it is hard to find businesses who do not make use of VoIP. I can’t remember when last I encountered an analog phone system.
It is thanks to the abundant availability and ease of use as well as further regulations to reduce call tariffs that VoIP is now much cheaper to use than traditional telephony.
Our most expensive tier VoIP service is costed at 75c/min for calls to cellular networks, 35c/min for calls to Telkom landlines and 45c/min for calls to other VoIP providers. International calls are much cheaper as well with calls to countries like Canada starting at only 0.098c/min. We also don’t charge for calls to other numbers in our network.
VoIP hardware may cost more than analog hardware, but considering the treasure trove of functionality they have to offer I think it’s safe to say it’s worth the investment. If your company objects to the up-front expense, we offer the option to lease the equipment. This comes with an inherent tax benefit as a lease is regarded as a operational expense while an up-front purchase is a capital expense. You will also have to deal with the depreciation of the equipment over time should you opt for the fully owned option.
Check out our FREE VoIP line offer.
It is unreliable
To be honest, I don’t have a clue why people would make this assumption but if I had to guess I’d say that it is most likely because they had to use internet connections based on old copper infrastructure in the past.
Let’s take DSL as an example. DSL utilised an analog telephone line to overlay extremely high frequency electronic waves on an audio line. When the line degrades it often affects the high frequencies more than the frequencies produced by your voice. As a result, your DSL would stop working or slow down while the voice part of the line continued working seemingly unaffected.
Other technologies such as ISDN and Diginet also utilises copper cabling and while especially Diginet was regarded as a “highly reliable” service I have seen them fail over and over again.
Typically within a business setting VoIP providers would utilise these extremely expensive copper technologies to run their clients’ VoIP services often leading to many frustrations. Even more so as copper infrastructure aged and degraded over time.
Nowadays we have incredible technologies available that are exceedingly reliable and robust. Enterprise fibre, microwave, and even LTE-a are all up to the task of delivering extremely reliable connectivity with very little to almost no downtime (if your ISP is worth their salt).
Since VoIP relies on the availability of a working internet connection it benefits from this reliability.
I normally recommend that our clients install an additional internet connection to handle outages. We often install a dedicated connection on a different network or technology (e.g. LTE-a) to handle VoIP only and then utilise Mikrotik or another capable product to manage the automatic failover should you lose connectivity. This ensures a fairly seemless failover with clients rarely noticing the outage.
It is also possible to have a failover with a hot spare such as that provided by VIBE. This utilises both internet connections at the same time and has 0 failover time and no packet loss in the process.
It has problems with poor call quality
Call quality can be an issue but there is always an underlying cause.
Let’s consider a cellphone call. When do we normally experience call quality issues with mobile phonecalls? It almost always has to do with reception. If your signal is low or if the signal quality is bad your cellphone call will suffer distortion, breakups and even disconnection. Bear in mind that cellphones until recently could only make calls using the carrier network. That is until VoLTE and VoWiFi came about. What are these other that Voice Over IP?
We also need to consider that VoIP utilises the UDP protocol. UDP is the ideal protocol for real-time transmissions. Unlike TCP, the UDP protocol does not retransmit lost or corrupt data packets to ensure 100% of the data is transmitted 100% accurately. The more you need to retransmit the bigger the delay in the transmission of the information you are trying to submit. UDP works on the assumption that you don’t care if some of the information isn’t transmitted, as long as most of it reaches the other side.
Realtime video and audio streams do not need to be wholly transmitted. If you watch live TV, let’s say a game of Soccer or Rugby, you would be fairly ticked off if you didn’t see those amazing scores exactly at the same time everyone else did. Even if a couple frames of data doesn’t make it through the transmission it’s okay. You’ll still see the game in realtime without losing out on too much of it when the video flickers or breaks up.
The same goes for voice calls. If you’re in a conversation you’d rather hear the person on the other end in realtime. If a conversation were delayed because of transmission errors you’d have a hell of a day trying to communicate with the other person. The longer you talk, the greater the delay will become.
Now that we understand that, we can understand the cause of poor call quality in VoIP services. You guessed it. Bad internet connectivity. Well, not always bad internet connectivity but it’s still to do with the internet connection nonetheless.
When an internet connection suffers packet loss due to some anomaly in the link itself, or in the case of wireless due to RFI (radio frequency interference), VoIP will without doubt suffer issues with call quality. You may experience jitter, moments of silence, reduced audio volume or calls simply going silent. This is simply because the RTP (real-time transport protocol) transmitting call audio is unable to transmit all of the packets since the internet/network connection is dropping or delaying packets.
Another reason for quality issues, and we see this quite often, is because VoIP is being sent over the internet connection without being handled properly. If you don’t have the facilities such as a VoIP VLAN or dedicated internet connection to ensure that your VoIP traffic is transmitted without contention, then you absolutely HAVE TO set up QoS (quality of service) on your router.
When RTP needs to coexist with normal internet traffic you run the risk of VoIP quality issues due to saturation of your internet bandwidth. When your internet connection is saturated your router by default would prioritise traffic on a first in, first out basis with no discretion over VoIP. So, if your audio packets arrive at the gateway they have to wait in the the queue along with everything else.
QoS is a way of telling your router to both place priority on the VoIP traffic and to reserve/guarantee some bandwidth at the same time. Mikrotik does this really well by allowing you to set a limit on the bandwidth your VoIP may use, guaranteeing minimum bandwidth and setting the overall priority of the VoIP traffic in relation to everything else. QoS ensures that your VoIP traffic has priority access to internet bandwidth.
The short version… VoIP doesn’t have poor call quality. People have bad internet.
It’s still a new technology that isn’t widely used
This couldn’t be further from the truth. The technology can be traced back as far as 1966 when Linear Predictive Coding (LPC) was first proposed. LPC is still used in VoIP to this day. In 1973 the first form of packet voice was presented as part of a flight simulator application. Only after the invention of the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) in 1996 and the proliferation of always-on high-bandwidth residential internet connectivity was a new industry of Internet Telephony Service Providers (ITSPs) born.
The development of open-source telephony software such as Asterisk fueled widespread interest and entrepreneurship in VoIP services, applying new Internet technology paradigms, such as cloud services to telephony. Read more on Wikipedia
VoIP has now grown exponentially in popularity globally and is expected to reach $194.5 billion by 2024 according to Persistence Market Research Pvt. Ltd. In South Africa, with the phasing out of copper infrastructure and the ongoing evolution of the modern workplace and work culture, VoIP is sure to increase in popularity. With increased popularity comes reduced costs…
Tech and software companies never seem to stop finding new ways of using VoIP either. From IP doorphones to Whatsapp through video conferencing and even Microsoft Teams (nope, not the video conferencing part you are familiar with 😅). These are all everyday technologies that leverage VoIP to make our lives a lot easier.
I think it’s safe to say that while modern VoIP technologies are less than 20 years old as at time of this writing, it’s already well matured and fit for everyday use.
You can’t keep your landline number
This actually used to be true until legislation mandating the introduction of number portability was accepted in 2005. (Electronic Communications Act 36 of 2005). This would include geographic numbers, non-geographic numbers in the 086, 080, 087 ranges, and mobile numbers as defined by the Numbering Plan Regulations.
Although the process that followed took a number of years, most of it has been implemented and soon you would even be able to port your mobile number to your VoIP operator (us) too.
Conclusion
It’s easy to see why people would believe these myths. VoIP was a technology ahead of its time but eventually our networks cought up and today VoIP is every bit as good and in many respects even better than it’s ancient predecessor. All that’s left now is for people to catch up too.
