5 Guidelines for SMB VoIP Implementation

This morning I saw this excellent blog post by Garrett Smith which points out a few tips on making the transition to VoIP easier for SMB.

His main point is bandwidth, bandwidth, bandwidth. Although it seems obvious, adequate bandwidth is an absolute requirement for VoIP. VoIP is very sensitive to packet loss and latency, which results in quality of service issues (i.e., echo, dropped calls, etc.). Do all of your employees stream music while checking their e-mail and utilizing web applications? That's going to affect the quality of your phone calls if you don't have the bandwidth to be able to handle it.

Fortunately, in modern computing, bandwidth is one of the cheaper things that you can buy, so resolving this problem is potentially pretty easy. (Who remembers paying $1,500+/month for a 1.5 MB T1 a few years back? Good riddance to that!) But Smith's advice of doing a network analysis before buying into VoIP is super important - and easy to forget when you're excited about saving money and integrating your phone into your business life in a way that only IP telephony can do.

But it's not just the Internet bandwidth that matters - the speed of your LAN also counts. If you're using significantly older equipment, you may not have the throughput locally to handle additional traffic. If you have any equipment that is still 10baseT (and we've seen this), you probably already have speed issues with your existing data connections. Adding VoIP will be a disaster.

But there's good news here too - if you've built or upgraded your network in the last 5-8 years, it's pretty unlikely that that you're going to run into that problem. If you've signed your contract with your ISP within the last 5 years or so, you probably also have adequate bandwidth. But it certainly never hurts to get some numbers into your hand before you make the leap and add your telephony traffic to your data connection.

VoIP is excellent in many regards - but like any technology, it must be implemented correctly.