10 Ways to Improve VoIP Call Quality
Millions of corporate employees moved to remote work environments during the pandemic. Making business calls from home became the new reality — and VoIP phone services made this task easier for both enterprises and employees. Office extensions could be assigned to laptops and smartphone devices, resulting in unhindered business communication.
What’s more, VoIP phone systems also came with collaboration capabilities like video conferencing and whiteboarding, and these goodies facilitated seamless workflows as employees stayed confined to their homes. The cost savings that VoIP phones brought also made them a smart investment for businesses.
However, the core metric by which any audio communication device is measured is voice quality. And VoIP raised some questions on this front. Was the call quality of VoIP telephony as good as it was before phones were digitized?
The switch to internet-based calls can pose some roadblocks on the call quality front. And if conversations are garbled and calls drop frequently, it undermines all the other benefits that VoIP phones bring to the table.
Switching to a cloud-based VoIP phone system comes with a long line-up of advantages for your business, as they have proven to be efficient, cost-effective, and more secure than PBX phone systems. However, it faces challenges like call latency, network congestion, and jitter that enterprises need to address in order to enjoy uninterrupted call quality.
Also, as the pandemic rolled across the world, IT departments were faced with an uphill task of maintaining VoIP call quality on thousands of home networks that they could not access directly.
A strong internet connection can fix most VoIP problems. But it doesn’t always guarantee a glitch-free calling experience. In this blog, we will look at how you can keep your conversations clear and get back on the road to reliable call quality.
Table of Contents
Causes of Poor VoIP Call Quality
Before we begin fixing our digital call quality, let us understand what causes this issue on VoIP phones. There are a few standard culprits that are the cause of call quality glitches on your internet phone:
#1. Jitter
Jitter happens when data packets that transfer sound over the internet arrive in random order or when there are intermittent time intervals between the arrivals of different data packets. Such delay in arrivals can cause high levels of jitter — which sounds like a stuttering or garbled speech quality — as all packets must be delivered in a prescribed order in order to transfer coherent data to the recipient. Likewise, if too many data packets get delayed then it results in breaks in the transfer of data.
#2. Packet loss
If a data packet is lost, takes time to reach its destination, or contains errors, then the network can drop or discard it before it reaches the recipient. Since every piece of a packet is needed to transfer data, if one piece does not arrive on time then it causes the whole packet to get lost. This usually occurs due to bandwidth restrictions, network congestion, overloaded devices, old hardware, or broken internet connections which cause big chunks of audio packets to go missing.
