Do you want to take control of your business communications with more than a few smartphone plans? Voice over Internet Protocol (VOIP) has made it easier to turn old telephone costs and challenges into something as quick and efficient as instant messaging, but even though there are many VOIP programs and services available, getting efficient communications still takes a bit of skilled engineering. To understand the different between a quick installation and a thorough infrastructure, here are a few VOIP planning and troubleshooting concerns.

The Robotic Voice Challenge

One common symptom of a working, but problematic VOIP line is the robotic voice. When someone speaks on a VOIP system such as Skype, Google Voice, Oovoo, or one of many other services, the voice can become digitized and lost in transmission just enough to sound like a metallic impersonation of a voice.

The end result is unique to VOIP, but the problem happens with traditional telephony technology as well in the form of static. Although there are many underlying causes, the main issue is a lack of bandwidth or line capacity to carry the data that represents your voice.

There are two main solutions here: make the voice information more efficient, or increase the line capacity. Increasing the line capacity is as simple as asking for more bandwidth from your Internet Service Provider (ISP) assuming that there aren't larger problems at play, such as an ever-growing voice file size. Changing voice efficiency is a bit more complex.

Codecs Are The Key To Voice Efficiency

When working with voice, music, videos, and many other forms of audio/video information, codecs become an important tool in making internet communications and media more efficient.

Although codec is literally a portmanteau of coder-decoder, you can understand it as a set of instructions for how voice information is handled. Codecs can be seen as a filter of sorts, or an artistic style for presenting your data in a certain way. There are many settings, theories, and standards for VOIP codecs, with a continuing push to make the best sounds, most lightweight codec.

For basic configuration, codec choice means deciding between small voice packets that may not sound great, or amazing sound quality with huge file sizes that require higher bandwidth/line capacity. In reality, you'll be choosing between codecs that try to balance both sides.

It's best to go with a popular industry standard, or something that other successful business networks have used to just to keep things simple. That said, an efficient codec is not an excuse to ignore your data network in general.

Contact a voice and data cabling professional to discuss your current network capacity and ways to make voice communications more efficient. For more information, contact a company like Hi Country Wire And Telephone.