VoIPisms: Episode 4 QoS

How important is QoS? It is extremely important. Especially for businesses that rely on their phones to be successful. But first, let’s start from the beginning. What does QoS stand for? It stands for “Quality of Service”.

What does QoS mean?

Well, it can mean a few different things but when it comes to VoIP, it’s simple. It’s how well your customers can hear you on the other line! As I had mentioned earlier, and I’m sure you will agree, this can be very important to businesses with call centers, inside sales teams, and customer support teams that use VoIP.

It is important to make sure you are ensuring the QoS of your phone calls! Doing this goes hand in hand with the way your business uses the Internet. I know this might sound confusing and right now you are probably saying “Why would the way I use my Internet affect my business’s quality of service?” So, allow me to explain.

Everything within your business that needs the Internet is hooked up to a router, most likely in your server room. It’s there that everything fights for whatever bandwidth that is available! If this is left unmonitored, bandwidth powerhouses like streaming video, or uploading will take as much as it wants. Kind of like an all-you-can-eat buffet!

When this happens, it leaves other things, like your VoIP phone system, with not enough bandwidth to function properly. This is where you can experience packet loss, resulting in voice delays, broken connections and even dropped calls.

But with a QoS router, like the Patton Smartnode 5200 Enterprise Session Border Router, you are able to prioritize how much bandwidth is used, and where it is used. This puts the bandwidth focus on your business’s important Internet assets, like your VoIP Phone system, but won’t starve other things in your office, like video conferencing or streaming videos.

So if your business is experiencing VoIP troubles and you can’t figure out why, it may not be your VoIP service provider. You might just need a little QoS!

How do you manage the bandwidth in your office? Do you use the Patton Smartnode 5200? Or something different? We want to know!