While VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) systems have become the go-to solution for business telecommunications, it’s not perfect. Sure, on the most part, the systems offer better call quality than traditional phone lines but there will be times when there are delays and poorer call quality. This is usually caused by what experts call ‘packet delays’, have you heard this term before?
So what exactly are packet delays and what you can do to minimize any issues and ultimately improve the quality of your VoIP based calls?
What are packet delays?
Before we look into this, it is a good idea to know what a packet is. In digital communication, data goes back and forth between a sender and receiver. This data can be anything from a file, information or even a VoIP call. In practice, this data is too large to actually send as one chunk. As a result, it is broken down into smaller pieces that are called packets.
These packets are then transmitted to the receiver and reassembled into the original piece of data. The time that these packets take to get from one source to another is called latency. However, because digital transmission lines can only handle so many packets at once, they occasionally become overloaded. This means it takes packets longer to get to their destination, causing higher latency, or in other words, packet delays.
When this happens, you will likely notice a drop in call quality, echoes and even delays.
What causes these delays?
In a perfect world, all networks and VoIP systems would be able to essentially organize their packets so as to minimize delay and offer high quality calls with zero issues. Unfortunately, this is not possible all of the time.
Packet delays are actually a normal part of VoIP, and providers have integrated systems and buffers to minimize their impact, offering call quality on a par with, and often better than traditional landlines.
There are two main reasons why delays occur:
How to minimize the effect of packet delays
As the end-user of VoIP systems, it may seem like there is little you can do to actually reduce packet delays. This isn’t true. There are actually several steps you can take to decrease delays:
VoIP is a valuable communications system, and if you are looking to integrate it into your business, or speed up and improve the quality of your calls, why not contact us today? There will be no delay in us looking for a solution you might just need.