VoIP Sucks! (And Why You’re Wrong)
First impressions are everything, especially when it comes to new technology. If the tech doesn’t live up to or exceed the expectations you have based on what you currently use and what you’ve been sold, your perceptions of the technology as a whole are warped based on the experience. This is particularly true of VoIP technology, where factors like poor quality phones and routers or an improperly set-up system can affect the entire experience and make people untrustworthy of VoIP as a whole. Back in the day of slow internet and old routers people may have had some VoIP challenges. With so many internet options these days and equipment that helps manage load right out of the box, VoIP is the best solution for most Canadian Businesses. Here are some of the biggest objections we hear and our myth busting responses!
"There’s no way VoIP is good quality!”
The two biggest misconceptions about VoIP that I hear are that there’s no way to get good quality phone calls (when in reality it should be perfect quality), and that it’s not possible to get good quality VoIP over public internet. In both of these cases it’s really just based on systems that were set up incorrectly or by someone with not as much experience as our technicians at net2phone Canada, and the problems are mostly with the local system rather than the VoIP system (so things like your router or internet connection instead of the software used to power your phones). In some cases, it may even have been due to the voice provider’s public switched telephone system interconnection being of poor quality.
"I just got VoIP and I’m disappointed. It sounds horrible!”
When VoIP is first implemented at a new office one of the main causes of disappointment, on the rare occasion that there is any disappointment, is low quality due to a lack of traffic shaping (basically reserving a section of your bandwidth solely for VoIP) or a misconfiguration of hardware. For the longest time (think a decade) there was a very good router that we would recommend to clients, however the setup procedures in their documentation for setting up VoIP was simply incorrect and unless you had the precise technical knowledge to know what the fix was, you would think that the router was just unsuitable for VoIP, which many of my peers did.
"My phones were working fine yesterday! What happened?”
Sometimes I’ll have existing clients call in complaining about the drop in their call quality and the first thing I ask is “what did you change?”, because almost 100% of the time there’s a new router or configuration that they didn’t think would affect their calls and all of a sudden nothing is working as it used to.
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There are 3 different kinds of router in the world:
1: routers that work well for VoIP right out of the box;
2: routers that can work for VoIP once the factory settings are changed; and
3: routers that do not work for VoIP.
At net2phone Canada, our technicians can help you find a solution no matter what router you have, and if the solution involves a new router we will ship one, preconfigured for your environment, to your location for free and will only bill you once you know your new solution works.
Still don’t believe me about VoIP quality? Request a demo today and hear the difference yourself!
