Is VoIP Reliable for Business? SD-WAN

Your company is researching hosted VoIP solutions to replace your on-prem PBX, but you’re concerned about call quality. How will the public Internet be as reliable as your current PRI?

The answer is your company will be fine, if you have a solid DIA connection. If you’d like additional assurance, however, you may want to research SD-WAN.

In this video, AeroCom President, Mike Smith, explains how adding an SD-WAN solution will provide your company with extra assurance of great call quality, at all times. In fact, your VoIP solution will be more reliable than your current on-prem system!

Want to know Mike’s recommendation on the best SD-WAN and/or VoIP vendors your company should be quoting? Click below.

Ask Mike

About Mike
Mike Smith is the Founder and President of AeroCom and has been helping companies with telecom and cloud services since 1999. He has been the recipient of numerous business telecommunications industry awards and in 2011, he was honored as one of the top 40 business people in Orange County, CA., under 40 years old. Follow Mike on LinkedIn, Twitter or SpiceWorks.

Transcript:

Your company is looking at replacing your phone system. And one of the options you’re considering is a hosted VoIP phone system or a hosted PBX.

I know one of the concerns you may have is call quality. Can you put all of your phone calls over a public internet connection, especially if you’re a medium or large-sized company and you have a lot of employees. Can you put those calls over a public internet connection and still have great voice quality and great voice reliability, like no drop calls and no one-way-media calls, things like that? Is that possible? Well, the answer is yes.

Most of the time you’re going to be fine if you have a dedicated internet access connection. If you want to know what that is, you can look on some of my blogs I posted about what is a dedicated internet access connection, like dedicated fiber where you have an SLA. So if you have that in place and it’s not overloaded, you should be pretty fine with hosted void.

But if you want to have some additional assurances that you’re not going to have voice quality issues, one of the cool technologies out there (that a lot of companies are starting to utilize for this purpose), is SD-WAN.

So what SD-WAN will do (especially if you use what I call cloud enabled SD-WAN solution), the service provider is going to deploy an appliance at each one of your sites (or even if you just have one site), they can do it just at one site. And that appliance connects up to the SD-WAN service provider’s cloud gateway. And now that you have routers on both sides of your internet connection in the cloud and on premise, the SD-WAN service provider will allow you to do traffic shaping for both outbound and inbound internet applications, as well as the load balance that those applications over several different internet connections.

So what that means is through an online portal, you can log in and prioritize voice calls above all your other internet applications. That’ll really ensure that you’re going to get great voice quality at all times because it makes sure your phone calls are not going to be competing against someone who might be live streaming in your office or listening to online music or backing up some files or things like that. So that’ll just give you some extra assurances it’ll also give you more visibility and do a ton of other cool stuff for your network and your LAN applications.

But the point I want to convey is that if you’re a little bit worried about voice quality with hosted VoIP, take a look at SD-WAN. That might give your IT department the additional assurances you need to feel good about deploying hosted VoIP and knowing that the CEO’s not going to yell at you one day for dropping a call or having bad voice quality on a consistent basis.

I hope that helps. If you have any questions on SD-WAN service providers or hosted VoIP service providers, feel free to give me a call. I’m happy to answer any questions you have on the technologies or which providers might be the best fit for your company.

[email protected]

877-465-3505

Have a great day!