Voip vs BT phone line

Voip vs BT phone line

Author
Discussion

fellatthefirst

Original Poster:

579 posts

154 months

Friday 3rd July 2015
quotequote all
Our business currently uses a voip phone set up. It's good in a sense that we can easily set the hours we want the phone line open, play a closed message, have hold music, your in a que etc etc BUT the phone line quality is just crap. Some days i really want to just smash the thing up!

We are in a rural location and our internet is about 5mb speed. Not the fastest but fast enough.

I'm seriously considering getting rid of the voip and changing back to a traditional bt line just for solid phone line quality.

Can anyone advise me if you can do all the same features on a bt line as you can with voip?

The main things i want are as follows:

Set open and closing days and times
Play a message when we are closed
Divert calls if we want to remote work away from the office
Allow "you're in a que" function
Play a message when you first call up before your call is answered for example "Thanks for calling my company, an operator will answer you're call shortly"

Is this all possible without costing an arm and a leg because the voip set up is very cheap?

Any help or advice would be greatly received.



toney

5 posts

157 months

Friday 3rd July 2015
quotequote all
Sorry for dodging your question, but have you queried the line quality with your VoIP provider? My understanding is that VoIP lines are of higher quality audio than landlines.

andyb28

761 posts

117 months

Friday 3rd July 2015
quotequote all
Voip is great, but is not without its problems.

5mb isn't a huge amount of bandwidth, I am going to guess your upload is around 400k?

How many people have voip phones in your office?
How many people can be on a call at the same time?
Do you have a separate ADSL line for the Voip system?
Has anyone setup the correct codecs for your phones, or are you using generic ones?

The main reason for call quality dropping are usually related to the above, possibly an easy one to look out for is some person watching a video / using all the bandwidth whilst you are on a call.

We support businesses that have 100+ voip phones and when its setup right it can be excellent.

morrisk1

630 posts

242 months

Saturday 4th July 2015
quotequote all
I can sympathise with you here. We had an 'up to 17MB' line but we had some real issues (generally person on the other end couldn't us). Ended up upgrading to fibre (up to 76MB) which has definitely improved things but we still do get the odd issue.

One thing I did find was Google Drive when syncing ramped up the issues.

Having all the features available with VOIP means we'll stay with it, but if I were in your situation I would probably go back to a normal line :-(

andyb28

761 posts

117 months

Saturday 4th July 2015
quotequote all
The easiest thing to do is run your voip over a second adsl line and don't let anyone use it for anything else.

rpguk

4,458 posts

283 months

Saturday 4th July 2015
quotequote all
Have you got a router that supports QOS? Setup properly this will give priority to voice traffic.


DSLiverpool

14,671 posts

201 months

Saturday 4th July 2015
quotequote all
andyb28 said:
The easiest thing to do is run your voip over a second adsl line and don't let anyone use it for anything else.
This is the answer plus you may have a crap provider.

Bullett

10,873 posts

183 months

Sunday 5th July 2015
quotequote all
What are the actual issues? Poor audio quality, drop outs one way audio etc. different symptoms will have different causes. The codec will have the biggest impact on audio quality but the higher the quality the higher the bandwidth. We used to recommend g711 as a good mix and even that only uses around 100k so 5mb is in theory fine. However you don't say what sort of connection you have or if there is a dedicated vlan in place. It could be your internal network not external that is at fault here.

In answer to your actual question, yes, it's possible but you would need a pbx of some kind which could be expensive.


MrDan

290 posts

189 months

Monday 6th July 2015
quotequote all
There is enough bandwidth there for VOIP, its just not being managed properly as per previous posts.

QoS would allow you to allocate say 20% of your bandwidth to the phones stopping those issues, failing that if you have say more than 5 users on the phone at one time a second ADSL would be the answer, and if its just for voice you can go for something with a silly low usage cap like 10GB to keep the cost down.

Don`t go back to a PBX :-)



dmsims

6,450 posts

266 months

Monday 6th July 2015
quotequote all
Bullett said:
only uses around 100k so 5mb is in theory fine.
MrDan said:
QoS would allow you to allocate say 20% of your bandwidth to the phones stopping those issues
Both of these statements are highly misleading

Firstly downstream is not going to be the issue (it rarely is) so 5Mb is irrelevant

Secondly with QoS how are you going to allocate 20%? - to the downstream will have no effect

We need to know the upstream bandwitdh - it could be as low as 448 Kbps

We don't know how much bandwidth each phone is using and even how many phones - OP ?


DSLiverpool

14,671 posts

201 months

Monday 6th July 2015
quotequote all
And just try making a call at lunchtime when the canteen is loading your wifi watching red tube, sky go and you tube - we still get at least two "back to analogue" calls a week who have been sold the dream to find the reality is not quite utopia.

akirk

5,376 posts

113 months

Tuesday 7th July 2015
quotequote all
we had this about 5 years ago (6mb download 800k up on broadband)
you can buy a router which will ringfence upload capacity for VOIP - we allocated 100k per line (3 lines in use) and never had any issues - despite being a company doing heavy downloads / uploads...
your voip company should be able to advise - we used voipfone and they were fantastic at helping set it up