VoIP

Voice over IP (VoIP) is an increasingly common technology where telephone calls use data communications rather than traditional telephone lines. There are some advantages to this such as the ability for the telephones to capitalize off of existing cabling and possibly increased bandwidth. It also means that communications leaving the business can use capacity on data communication lines. This costs very close to that of traditional phone circuits but it provides more options. A data circuit with excess capacity can be used instead of a dedicated phone circuit. On the internal network it provides many opportunities for phone features that are more difficult to obtain from traditional phone systems due to the different architecture used by VoIP phone networks. However there are also drawbacks in addition to the bandwidth strain it adds to the data network. If the telephone conversation doesn’t travel over the data network instantly without any packet loss there is degradation of voice quality which is not normally found on traditional telephone networks. This means that quality of service (QoS) should be configured on the network if at all possible.

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