Telephony has been evolving over recent years. With the internet having become such an essential part of the way we work, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that calls are moving over to the internet from old telephone lines as a result. There are a variety of advantages to the new technology which can be incredibly beneficial to any size of business, ranging from quality of calls, increased numbers of concurrent calls and the cost of individual calls, which are detailed in the next section.
What are the benefits of VoIP?
VoiP or ‘Voice over Internet Protocol’ is a maturing technology which sends audio packets of data over the internet, rather than traditional telephone lines.
As an example, traditional Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN) lines have very little bandwidth for each call, using frequency ranges from 300hz to 4000hz. This is adequate for legible audio out of a phone speaker but doesn’t impress from a quality standpoint.
VOIP lines do not have this restriction. The majority of VOIP calls are made from desktop machines, whereby the average microphone can go as low as 30 hertz, all the way up to 16 kilohertz in frequency. These ranges cover the majority of the range at which humans can hear, meaning they can offer a lifelike sound which is more pleasing to the ear. This does, however, require the other party to have VoIP services too, otherwise, the resulting signal will be downsampled to the limited frequency range supported by the older ISDN.
According to industry experts such as IDT Express, organisations can also see savings of between 50% to 75% versus traditional phone lines when switching over to VoIP due to the falling costs of wholesale VoIP termination rates. This can result in huge cost savings on a service that underpins so many businesses, such as call centres or simply on phones used by employees around the office. You can find more information regarding wholesale VoIP rates on industry sites such as https://www.idtexpress.com/blog/2018/04/07/wholesale-voip-termination-rates-why-voip-is-booming/.
Considerations to make before you switch
As indicated on the Ofcom website broadband connections are required for VOIP
VoIP also requires significant bandwidth and may thus require an upgrade to your internet connection. For example, upload speeds of 10 megabits per second facilitate a theoretical maximum of around 100 concurrent calls.
Anna is an author at Max90hyperfuses.co.uk and contributed many more articles on different topic. Anna has knowledge of digital marketing.