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To get the most out of voip
The Right Foundation
To get the most out of VoIP, you'll need an Internet connection that offers enough performance to accommodate an appropriate call volume for your company. A good rule of thumb is to have enough capacity for roughly one third of your employees. So, if you have 30 employees, you should have enough capacity to allow 10 of them to be on the phone at any one time.
Broadband Internet access is pretty common these days, and you may be wondering whether that super-fast cable modem or DSL connection you already have will work with VoIP. While cable and DSL connections are great for tasks like browsing the Web or streaming video, they're not always the best choice for VoIP, because most provide with lots of downstream (to your network) bandwidth and relatively little upstream (away from your network) bandwidth.
Case in point: cable and DSL typically offer download speeds of several megabits per second, but most provide a mere fraction of that (sometimes as little as 128kbps) for uploads. This type of asynchronous connection is fine for the kinds of tasks cited above because they primarily involve one-way communication, but making calls over the Internet is quite different. For VoIP, upstream bandwidth is every bit as important as downstream, particularly if you plan to use more than just one phone.
While a cable or DSL connection with sufficient upstream bandwidth might be acceptable for a telecommuter, home office or sole proprietor, larger SMBs — or those that anticipate a lot of call volume — will want to consider a high-speed synchronous Internet connection like a T1 line. Although they can be a bit more expensive and offer somewhat slower download speeds than some business-class cable or DSL service, at 1.54 Mbps in each direction a T1 offers ample bandwidth to satisfy the requirements of both data and voice traffic.
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