There are few more pressing problems to your network, whether the internet or office-confined intranet – than connectivity, speed and bandwidth issues. These tend to have a host of related problems that arise, costing you efficiency from multiple areas.
Measuring Your Service
Fortunately, there are measures such as an online VoIP test that can ascertain the extent to which the above problems plague your network. Furthermore, as the business marketplace becomes ever more dependent on technological innovation, and services like VoIP begin to assert their utility over the older, still more common methods of information exchange, you might even have to take measures to ensure that your ISP is respecting the principles of network neutrality, by making sure you are getting the service you paid for – even if it isn’t necessarily as beneficial to that particular ISP to deliver these services to you.
Checking Your Internet Speed
For example, let’s say you purchase an internet package from an ISP; how can you be sure you’re receiving the internet connection speeds for which you’re being charged? Some bandwidths are so large, you could be streaming movies and not notice jitter or latency, but be paying twice as much as necessary for the desired effectiveness. A VoIP test is very good for pinpoint accuracy of bandwidth, as well as the following attributes that are of significant concern to VoIP-enabled businesses:
1. Despite its clear advantages over conventional phone use, Voice-over Internet Protocol users are sometimes saddled with jitter, which is a variation in the delay between packet delivery on the network. Not surprisingly, the most common cause of jitter is insufficient bandwidth, which can also result from a profundity of other applications eating up the original allocation. As such, a VoIP test can easily tell you precisely how much bandwidth you have, but also the amount of jitter in the network.
2. Latency is another issue that affects the timeliness of data packet delivery, which can ultimately result in so-called echoes, which degrade the quality of the call. If you haven’t opted for a provider that takes robust measures to make sure some data packets don’t take too long to travel from point-to-point, then you shouldn’t have to pay as though you did.
3. Rounding out the network issues you might experience is outright data loss, which comes in the form of packet loss. While this is a reality of all communications, of course it should be minimized; and, with VoIP, you shouldn’t lose any more than about 2%. The cause is when the traffic on your server is too much for your present bandwidth; which can be solved in the same way once you use a test to get the specifics, as jitters: get more bandwidth or reduce other tasks.
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- License: Creative Commons image source
Want to read more? Contact Brendan Kenny @ Beekayyyyyy.