Do you use Voip at your place of employment? Love it or Hate it?

5 Comments

1. topgun h says:

   September 8, 2010 at 5:28 pm

   Even in a busy call center envirnment VoIP can provide the same call quality as a traditional landline and in the majority of situations at a much lower cost. However, the following conditions should be considered and met. A deficiency in any of the following can (and most likely will) cause issues.

   1. Make sure the computer being used has plenty of RAM, Storage and processing speed to run the telephony software and all other applications that will need to run at the same time.
   2. Use known and proven telephony software. Cisco Call Manager and Rockwell Convergence (now Aspect) work well together and are very reliable.
   3. Use a high quality headset – that applies to landlines too. I myself prefer Plantronics.
   4. BANDWIDTH, BANDWIDTH, BANDWIDTH!
   Both Local Area Network and Internet Bandwidth.
   Can your network handle the additional traffic. If there will be more than a few users then use a dedicated VoIP server.
   When determining bandwidth needs the following should be calculated.
   a. Amount of bandwidth needed for each extention.
   b. Voicemail – when under it’s heaviest use how many extentions are active at a time.
   c. Do you utilize an IVR – How many concurrent calls does it process at peak times.
   d. Call Queue – During peak periods do you have a large amount of calls in Queue? Remember each call in queue is utilizing bandwidth. If you don’t have enough bandwidth for your call queue then call quality will drop across all extentions – usually echo and delay – which in turn will make your agents handling time go up and put even more calls in queue and so on…

   Some downsides to using VoIP:
   If your internet connection goes down and you don’t have any traditional landline backup then NO PHONES.
   If an application freezes that requires a computer restart then an active call on that computer must be ended or it will be lost.

   VoIP offers a great deal of flexibility and cost savings for adding capacity. Both temporary and permanent.

   It is partcularly cost effective if additional temporary capacity is needed as workstations can even be added at a different physical location without having phone lines installed.
2. james k says:

   September 8, 2010 at 5:28 pm

   no i dont use it burrrrrp exuse me
3. Roy C says:

   September 8, 2010 at 5:28 pm

   I have used voip to landline and think it great so far. I used it like a telephone.
4. David T says:

   September 8, 2010 at 5:28 pm

   I do not have it, but I am a computer science student, and can tell you how it theoretically works, as well as some experiences from people I know.

   VOIP basically is like holding a phone call over the internet. For a place of business, it can be very efficient for in-house calls (from one office to another) because the call never has to leave the building. The data from your phone is turned into transferable packets, and sent to the other phone, where it is turned back to the phone message, similar to how you can send a picture over the internet. In an office, this is very fast, as it can just go through the router/local network, and never have to actually venture out into the comparitively slow "real internet".

   However, for out going calls (to people NOT directly plugged into your VOIP system) VOIP is a mixed bag, mainly depending on your internet speed. I have a friend who has VOIP, and when I call him, there is always a two second delay in conversation, because the cable internet where we live is pretty slow. Also, he frequently cuts out for split seconds as packets are presumably lost.
   For an individual, VOIP doesn’t save enough money over a real phone line for it to be worth it. Companies may save more money, because multiple phone lines are exponentially more expensive than multiple VOIP lines. However, if your internet connection is anything less than fast, you will find the people on the other end of your phone calls to be fairly annoyed.
5. Dot B says:

   September 8, 2010 at 5:28 pm

   Hi, yes I use voip, Skype. I am just a stay at home mum, but use it to talk to my daughter who is in the USA. (I live in New Zealand).

   It’s not bad, but sometimes I get a bit of echo, but hey, it’s free!