Is Call Quality a Problem with Business Cloud Phone Systems? (UCaaS)

You’re tasked with replacing a medium-large-size company’s phone system (hundreds or thousands of employees), and you’re wondering if the call quality for business cloud phone systems is good.

In this video, I go over 5 mandatory preparations for your company to avoid any call quality issues.

Want my recommendations on the best cloud phone system vendors? Ask me today.

About Me

Mike Smith has been helping companies select the best telecom, WAN, security, and cloud services since 1999. He founded AeroCom in 2003, and has been the recipient of numerous business telecommunications industry awards, including being recognized as one of the top 40 business people in tech-heavy Orange County, CA. Follow Mike on YouTube, LinkedIn, Reddit and SpiceWorks.

Transcript

If your company is in the market for a new phone system, especially if you’re a medium to large sized company, you’re probably moving off an on prem system. You’re probably looking at cloud phone systems. Am I right? Well, one of the questions you probably have moving from an on prem system to a cloud phone system is our cloud phone systems reliable? Is the call quality really good on cloud phone systems, especially for a good sized company? That’s not something you want to do is install a phone system that’s going to have bad call quality. You’re going to have tons of complaints coming in and the CEO coming in saying, Hey, what do we just do? Well, I’m going to answer that question in this video. My name is Mike Smith. I’m the president of Arrow. Let’s put our heads together on this.

My Recommendations

but first, if you’d like my recommendation on the best cloud business phone systems, your medium to large size companies should be quoting. Reach out, send me an email or give me a call (714.593.0011). I’m a broker for all the major cloud phone systems out there. I represent over three 400 different cloud business phone systems, and I will help you make a lot better decision in a fraction of the time. Send me an email. Give me a call. I’d love to help you. It’s the reason why I do these videos. If you like the video, it’s a nice way to say thank you. Just reach out and ask me for a quote. Also, don’t forget to subscribe to the channel so you don’t miss any of my weekly videos that I put out. If you’d like to video, hit the like button, ring the bell and leave me a comment down below. I’d love to hear from you.

I’ve been in the industry since 1999

Well, when it comes to call quality with cloud business phone systems, a lot’s changed over the years, so I’ve been in the industry since 1999. And to tell you a little story about call quality and my experience with cloud phone systems, I worked for a company in 1999 that eventually launched a cloud phone system. One of the first ones is right around 2001. They launched a product. Only one sales rep that I knew of actually sold it, and it didn’t go so hot and they rolled it back. But needless to say, I’ve been interested or fumbling around with cloud phone systems and selling them for quite a long time, and I’ve seen the product evolve quite a bit. I purchased the first cloud phone system for our business in 2005, so I was one of the first movers for sure. It was something called Covad and it sounds weird staying covered nowadays after COVID happened, but there was a company that bought a company called Go Beam, and that was one of the first business cloud phone systems out there that was really mass marketed to businesses. So we purchased it. It was a product that we could sell. We tried selling it a lot and nobody was really buying it. We bought it for our company. We ran it over an SDSD line, if you know what that is, and didn’t really have any call quality issues. But the big pitch for us, when the service providers would come to us that sold business cloud phone systems as they would say, you should always sell a dedicated TI one line, which was really an MPLS circuit with every cloud phone system that you sell because that guarantees great call quality all the time.

A lot of Latency

Without that,you have to send all the calls over the public Internet and over the public Internet you get a lot of latency, packet loss and jitter. They really drilled that into our head. Latency packet loss and jitter are the biggest enemy to call quality for cloud business phone systems. So for many years we tried to sell cloud business phone systems with dedicated TI ones so that you could get great call quality. And it was a hard sell. A lot of businesses weren’t really buying them. They were still sticking to on prem business phone systems. We sold a little bit of it here and there, but mostly we’re still just selling dial tone to businesses and pure eyes and trunks and stuff like that. Then I was at a conference in probably 2013, 2014. We had a booth at an expo in Las Vegas for IT professionals, and I started talking to an I.T. professional and he told me he was running a cloud phone system over business class cable, and he had about 150 insurance agents in his office and he didn’t have any call quality issues. That literally blew my mind because for the last 15 years or so, almost 15 years, I had been told, man, if you send business phone calls over the public Internet, especially over a broadband connection that’s shared with the with the whole neighborhood, that’s going to be a nightmare.

I Figured out how to reduce Latency

You’re going to get all kinds of quality issues. Well, he was saying he never had any call quality issues. So that was my first eyeopener that maybe what I was being told wasn’t quite the truth. Sure enough, within a few years I’d say right around 2000, 16 or so, we started selling a lot of cloud phone systems and we were never selling them with dedicated t one lines to protect call quality. Sure, there was a lot more bandwidth available than way back when In 2000, three, 2000, five, 2001. But still the latency packet, loss and jitter over the public internet wasn’t a big deal. So from that point on, we’ve been selling cloud phone systems all the time over the public Internet. And really there’s there are definitely some things that you want to do to protect yourself from call quality issues, and I’m going to review those in a minute. But overall, is it safe to have a cloud business phone system running over the public Internet? Are you going to have call quality issues? You’re not going to have call quality issues. It is absolutely safe for you to do it. In fact, if you’re if you have an on prem system today that are SIP trunks, that’s doing the same thing anyway. So you might as well have a cloud business phone system because it’s just as reliable as sip trunks over the public Internet. So let me go over some steps, though, to ensure that you might want to do to ensure you have great call quality at all times.

5 Mandatory preparations

Okay. There are actually five mandatory preparations that you should make in order to get ready for a cloud business phone system. So I’m going to review all five of these steps right now.

Okay. The first category I want to talk about is mandatory preparation. So these are things you should absolutely do no matter what, no matter what size business you are. These are six different things you want to do. All right? Number one is you want to make sure you have a stable Internet connection with at least 100 K of bandwidth per simultaneous call that’s going to be taking place in your office. All right. Now, when I say stable Internet connection, what I’m meaning is just a good at least broadband Internet connection. What I what I would say is an unstable Internet connection is like a faulty DSL line that you have because you can’t really get a good business class cable connection at that site. And so you have this DSL line that’s really slow. It kind of goes in and out. That’s a bad Internet connection to run VoIP across. But as long as it’s a good broadband Internet connection, like business class, cable or, you know, Frontier FiOS or AT&T, ABF, you know, business fiber, things like that, then you should be fine.

Preparations 2-5

Mandatory preparation number two is that you should have a backup Internet connection, especially at larger sites. So because all of your calls are going to be running over the Internet, Internet connections go down. That’s just what they do. That’s the way it’s always going to be. You can’t rely on your business Internet connection, always being up in order for your phone system to be up. So if it’s if uptime and call quality is really important, get a backup internet connection.

Number three, make sure that SIP algae is disabled on all of your routers and switches. That’s been a VoIP killer since the inception of VoIP, so make sure that is disabled. I don’t know why it needs to be disabled. I’m not an IT technician. The fact it’s called SIP is confusing because that’s an internet protocol. But just trust me, disable that.

Number four, make sure all of your routers and switches have the latest firmware.

Number five run traffic shaping on your router so that it prioritizes voice calls over non-priority internet traffic like an employee looking at a live stream of the World Cup.

Optional Preparations

Okay. Now I’m going to talk about the optional preparations you might need to make, or at least have these in your back pocket in case you’re not getting great call quality when you go to install your business cloud phone system.

Number one is SD WAN. SD WAN is optional because if you’re a really small company, SD WAN might not make a lot of sense. Or if calls really aren’t that big of a deal in your organization, maybe SD WAN doesn’t make a lot of sense. I can’t put that in the mandatory category, but SD WAN should be something that you should consider, especially if you have a large company in call. Quality is really important to the business. I’d recommend using SD WAN. You can watch my other videos on SD WAN and how it improves call quality to get more information on that topic. Something else you might want to do is test all of your cables and data jacks to make sure all the pins are working correctly. Things like that. So that’s kind of one of those things you might want to have in your back pocket in terms of troubleshooting. Because if you know a data jack is unreliable today, you’re probably going to swap that out. But if everything’s working correctly today, there’s no way of you really Knowing and going and checking. Every single cable in the office might be a little bit of overkill. So maybe something you want to have in your back pocket that that could be a source of voice quality issues down the road. So just keep it, keep it ready just in case.

Optional Preparations 2-5

Another item is you might want to choose a cloud phone system service provider that gives you MOS scores mean opinion scores on calls that are taking place. So that’s just a call quality rating that service providers can give you in a report. So that’s a just a nice little tool that IT departments can have to kind of track down call quality issues. So call quality is a big concern of yours. Make sure the service provider you choose. Does MOS score reporting you also want to be careful of wi fi connections. So whether it’s an employee using a softphone on a computer that’s connected to wi fi or an employee using a desk phone, that you’ve got a wi fi dongle connected to wi fi, as we all know, may not be the best way to connect your phone system and run calls over, but it works a lot of times. So it’s not to say that it won’t work over wi fi, but just something to keep in mind if you’re getting call quality issues from a certain employee, just check that they’re not on wi fi.

And lastly, you might want to be careful of Bluetooth headsets or headsets in general. So if there’s a call quality issue, just make sure that you replicate the call quality issue over a desk phone or over another employee’s phone, not just on a single headset, maybe swap out a headset, bring in a different headset, because the headset itself could be calling or causing call quality issues, especially if it’s a Bluetooth headset.

Still confused? Reach out and contact me

So I hope that video is helpful. If so, don’t forget to hit the like button and subscribe to the channel so you don’t miss any of my future videos. And overall, if you’d like my recommendation on the best cloud phone system vendors, your company should be quoting Which ones are the most reliable? Which ones? My customers have had the best experiences with based on your company’s requirements. Reach out, send me an email or give me a call (714.593.0011). I’m a broker for all the major cloud phone system vendors out there, and I’ve been doing this for over 20 years, as you just heard in the video. So I know each provider has a different niche and based on your company’s requirements, all pair you up with a provider who’s got a great reputation, maybe give you three or four recommendations or introduce you to the best sales reps to work with that.

Those vendors oversee a demo for you and oversee the coding process. So especially if your company is a midsize, that’s my expertise, like 50 or 100 employees or more. Reach out to contact me, send me an email, give me a call. And on top of all those benefits, the nice thing is your company won’t have to pay me a dime to service providers, actually pay me my broker fees.

So there’s no excuse not to at least give me a call, see what I have to think about. What I recommend for your business. I love to talk about this stuff with you. Don’t hesitate to reach out. All right? Don’t forget to subscribe to the channel. Thank you for watching, and I’ll catch you on the next one.