Voip provider company that delivers hosted voip services
A Voip provider is a company that delivers hosted voip services to businesses or consumers. In the B2B marketplace these are companies like Voxalis, BT, or Broadview Networks and in the B2C market Skype, Vonage, or Google Talk. Hosted Voip enables business to take advantage of the very latest in business telephony features without the large capital outlay associated with purchasing a high end business phone system (PBX).
There are a number of Voip providers in the UK marketplace, the purpose of this article is to help business decision makers understand how to differentiate between the various providers.
The key for a voip provider to deliver a business quality service is in the access network used to connect the client site to the service provider network. A broadband connection is used to achieve this but there is a large number of different broadband technologies. For simple consumer use or for home workers it is possible to use a standard internet broadband circuit to connect but this is not suitable for office deployments. This is because of the congested or busy nature of the public internet where there are large volumes of data and voice traffic all competing for space. In the world of data this does not really matter as it is not real time but with voice it is vital that packets are delivered in real time so that the audio quality is not compromised. A good voip provider will have a network set up that has been engineered for voice specifically. The best way to achieve this is by utilising a private network that does not connect to the public internet. Voip provider Voxalis acheives this with its Private Access Network (PAN). Voxalis PAN is a private, voice only, un-contended network. This enables Voxalis to guarantee call quality and line availability for a specific client site as the only traffic on its network is its own voice services. This removes any competition for space. The message here is that providing more bandwidth does not guarantee quality, it must be the right type of network.
In addition to connectivity other key questions should be asked of a voip providers network. These relate to security and disaster recovery as any business using a hosted voip provider is 100% reliant on the voip providers network. A voip providers core systems must be housed in a secure data centre with high levels of connectivity. These data centres are often referred to as carrier hotels and have been specifically designed to host the equipment of ISPs and Telecoms service providers. They have multiple levels of power resiliency and have multiple connections to other carriers networks. By using carrier hotels voip providers can ensure that they have resilient connectivity to their partner networks and the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN). Voxalis are located in twin data centres, InterXion in the City of London, and Telecity in Londons Docklands. Located on separate power grids and with geographically separate connections to its partners this set up allows Voxalis to offer a truly resilient service to its clients.
From the above we can see that even before evaluating the telephony features that a voip providers have to offer there are questions that need answering about their network set up. Once these have been satisfied a shortlist of voip providers can be produced and an evaluation of the telephony features can begin.
Categories: VOIP Articles Tags: Broadview Networks, BT, Google Talk, Hosted Voip