This is undoubtedly an important question, which anyone who uses or seeks to subscribe to a VoIP service should ponder upon. If you desire to use VoIP phone service for your domestic or business usage, you must take this into serious consideration. VoIP phones are increasingly becoming greater people’s choice. Why? Because, a VoIP phone service is affordable, user-friendly, available-on-the-go, unlike a traditional landline service that is expensive, inflexible and immobile.
VoIP phones function over high speed broadband internet – this, in fact, has been discussed many a times. However, there are users who complain that their VoIP phones aren’t giving them the quality of service they expected. It is not the VoIP service provider who is at fault. It is rather your Internet service provider who isn’t giving you an up-to-the-mark service.
Let’s begin with a brief introduction on understanding bandwidth. Bandwidth is the ability to transport information or data (or your VoIP phone call) from one location to the other in short, fixed time duration. The time taken to carry this data is directly dependent on the speed of your bandwidth, i.e., higher bandwidth is reciprocal to the amount of data that can be sent over via your internet connection. However, if your internet connection isn’t giving you sufficient bandwidth, you are likely to experience delay in data transfer and at times, call might drop as well.
When seeing the kinds of bandwidth, we have:
1. upload bandwidth
2. download bandwidth
Upload Bandwidth refers to the amount of information that can be sent across the Internet. Download bandwidth refers to the amount of information that can be received through the Internet. If your ISP provides you more bandwidth, you will be able to make VoIP phone calls easily and carry on with your normal web browsing simultaneously as well.
Normally, a VoIP phone call uses up to 90 Kbps. If your Broadband Internet connection fails in offering at least this value of bandwidth, subsequently your VoIP phone service provider might allow you the option to lower your bandwidth.
There are some VoIP providers in the market who facilitate their subscribers with a facility that lowers the voice quality if you decrease the bandwidth requirement for VoIP calls down to 60 Kbps or, to all the way till 30 Kbps. You can settle this with your VoIP service provider to any bandwidth that your internet service supports best.
However, to avoid any problem, you can purchase an internet service provider that gives sufficient bandwidth to support your high quality VoIP calls. Generally, Higher VoIP voice quality is thought to be default setting. Nevertheless, if, in case, your bandwidth is limited, then setting your VoIP bandwidth to lower settings (either 60 kbps or 30kbps) will help. Additionally, consumers receiving 128 Kbps uploading speed on their internet connections are likely to receive lower VoIP service quality because of the bad quality of service offered by their ISP.
The ultimate solution would be to sign up with an ISP that offers bandwidth ranging from 128kbps-600kbps. In this regard, DSL and Cable Internet connections make the perfect choice. Cable internet connection is a little on the higher cost side, though, it offers a faster service and speed (600kbps) compared to a DSL service. As for considering what makes a better option for VoIP, in that case, DSL and Cable internet services both work in tune with the required VoIP phone’s bandwidth for making local or international calls.
Guest Post
This is a guest post published by VoIP phone service
I think the speed of internet has gone out of dicussion as far as the VoiP phone service is concerned. Although, VoIP phone service is totally dependant on internet hence very few people worry about their internet connection speed. The reason is simple now everyone has a broadband or high speed internet connection at his home as well as office.
VoIP phone service is mainly dependent on internet and the speed of internet has increased considerable in the last decade. Many problems that were associated with the VoiP phone service have automatically resolved since the availability of high speed internet. However, until now, VoIP phone service could not make it compatible for low speed internet services like dial up internet.