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John Scarborough: Businesses across the country are converting to VoIP by the thousands every week. What you might not realize is the importance that the reliability of your local area network or LAN and broadband connection play in the service delivery and call quality.

Let’s take a look at this diagram. This is like the three legs of a stool. All three legs have to work together for a successful implementation. Let’s look at the first leg of the stool, your LAN. Your LAN must be ready and compliant to support the real time nature of VoIP communications, voices being packetized and sent across your LAN just like in e-mail or any other data application. But by the very nature of any live or real time conversation, the slightest delay caused by network congestion within your LAN will cause call quality issues such as choppiness or dropped audio. Please note that the vast majority of call quality issues are caused by an underlying problem in your LAN so everything on your LAN including switches, routers, firewalls and cabling must be ready to support your VoIP communications in order to ensure optimal call quality.

The second leg of the stool is your broadband connection. This connection must have enough capacity to support the combined utilization needs of your voice and data traffic. It must consistently deliver packets with low latency and no packet loss. We have found that VoIP operates best with less than 100 milliseconds latency. Please realize that broadband connections like DSL and cable are shared networks and can vary in their ability to consistently deliver voice communications. However, T-1 or any other private line connection which we always recommend by the way, is the optimal broadband medium for the delivery of high quality VoIP communications.

The third leg of the stool is your new hosted phone system provided by IP5280. This is a fully redundant carrier class network designed for high availability and reliability and is hosted in several world class data centers operating 24 by 7.

In summary, the three legs of the stool are your LAN, your broadband connection and your IP5280 hosted VoIP phone system. To reiterate, in the event you experience call quality problems, they’re generally due to an underlying problem in your local area network or your broadband connection.