What is the difference between a consumer VoIP provider and a business class VoIP provider?
From Bandipedia
Beware of consumer VoIP providers masquerading as business VoIP providers!
More and more businesses are realizing that VoIP may be a technology that they should investigate. They have heard that there are significant cost savings and that service reliability has gotten better and better. They may have even experienced VoIP for themselves at home and wonder if they can use VoIP at the office.
The answer is yes, but likely not from the provider that they have chosen to use at home. Several consumer VoIP providers have suggested that they have a business offering, but it is nothing more than a residential offering marketed differently.
Looking for some tell-tale signs that identify a true business class VoIP provider can help the business user avoid alot of heartache in the future.
The most prominent difference between consumer based VoIP products and business applications are broken down to the protocol, CPE implementation, and the ability for the provider to manage the solution down to the LAN, not the analog gateway connected to the WAN.
Most common to the consumer based service is the Codec G.729a which lowers the overall expense to the carrier but also has a larger percentage of VoIP related problematic issues. The RTP streams of SIP based G.729a signaling are smaller, therefore have a more substantial impact on quality if a packet needs to be re-transmitted or is dropped all together. In contrast you do not see this issue related to the G.711 Codec which does not compress the RTP streams. “Hiccups†or dropped packets of uncompressed voice are not as noticeable.
The significant differences can be broken up into the following groups:
Contents |
Quality of Service
A staccato line or a dropped call can be tolerated if you are on the phone with a friend but not if you are trying to close a business deal or are hosting a conference call. The quality of your call must be every bit as good, or better, than a traditional analog line. This call quality can be graded by a technical measure called a MOS score, but sufficient for this illustration is that the call needs to sound perfect.
QoS is supplied by devices placed on a carrier network or just as often through a piece of hardware at the customer's premise. This hardware prioritizes voice traffic over data traffic, which makes sure that your important business call takes preference over the guy next to you who is trying to download his NCAA Tournament brackets. If QoS is supplied at the network level, you must be certain that it impacts traffic all the way down to the router.
Service Level Agreement
Quite simply, this is how the carrier proves to you that they stand behind their assurances of QoS. Consumer VoIP is best efforts which means there are no guarantees. A business class VoIP SLA assigns meaningful financial penalties, often up to a free month, for any significant outage.
Class 5 Features
Business phone systems have a stable of features that are essential for the running of a business. They include 4 digit interoffice calling, call forwarding, transfer and conference call and then some of the more complex services such as auto attendant and bridge line appearances. Your business class VoIP service should have all of the features that your traditional TDM or key system PBX has and more.
Business VoIP specific Features
Cost savings and reliability continue to be the key drivers behind the decision for a business to transition to VoIP, but the company is often pleasantly suprised by the increase in employee efficiency from the adoption of some key features that are made possible (or much better) by VoIP. Two such features are:
Find me/Follow me
Find me/Follow me allows an employee to program how they are reached and organizes those that are likely to call them into separate groups, each with separate call treatments all configured from a portal at the user's desktop. For instance, the user might decide that a certain group of VIP clients should be automatically transferred to the user's cell phone after two rings, while a different set of customers are transferred immediately to voice mail.
Find me/Follow Me is also considered by many to be a Disaster Prevention Tool. With a Hosted PBX solution, if a disaster happens (a power outage, a phone company outage, a phone line being cut, a bad weather day, etc.) many companies cannot continue to take calls, resulting in lost business. A "Find me" solution with a hosted auto-attendant will still greet callers, offer them the options of dial-by name directories, departments like Sales, Customer Service, etc., and then route calls appropriately. If the land lines are down, or the internet or power is out, the calls will still roll to secondary lines that are programmed in, like cell phones, keeping the business answering its calls while its neighbors are sitting without anyway to know if customers are trying to call them.
For Sales people who have given customers cell phone numbers in the past, this service still allows clients to reach them on their cell phones, without actually knowing the number of that cell phone. When coupled with a feature like call screening and announcing, Find me/Follow Me can greatly improve the quality of a salesperson's life.
Unified Messaging
Unified messaging means that voice mail can now be viewed as e-mail. Each voice mail is attached to an e-mail as a .wav file and can be easliy viewed within Outlook or other mail clients. This is helpful for a user that comes back from vacation and doesn't want to quickly see all of the voice mail that they have, and it is of great utility when the user wants to forward the .wav voice mail to others as an e-mail attachment.
Committed methodology to network assesments, transition plans and training
Business VoIP deployments that go astray rarely do because of problems with the technology. The vast majority of companies that have had issues with their VoIP deployments suffer because of the lack in planning. The average business doesn't know what they should check for as they plan and migrate to a new phone system. The business should rely on a tried and true methodology provided for them by their carrier. Review some of the items that should be considered prior to a transition to VoIP.
Access to trained professionals that have technical competency
This should be obvious, but you shouldn't trust your VoIP deployment to the equivalent of the TimeLife Operator. You should know the experience level of the Account Executive, Sales Engineer, and Installation Staff of the company you are working with. Lastly, don't hesitate to ask for references.
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