Why Access & IP Voice are Better Together

Internet connectivity is the lifeblood of modern businesses. When internet connections are unstable, productivity suffers, and along with it, so does collaboration, customer care, and sales. All of this costs time and money, never mind the frustration of dealing with spotty internet.
 
By the same token, poor IP voice quality also impacts businesses. At a minimum, we’re talking about a bad first impression. But we’re also talking about problems communicating with customers. This can not only affect sales, it can also affect customer care. Customers who can’t expect a clear conversation with a business will soon stop giving that business money.
 
To know what you can do to improve the quality of your IP voice service, it helps to understand the concepts of jitter and packet loss.

What Is Jitter & Packet Loss?

Information is sent through data lines in little packets of data. When the time between packet arrival gets choppy, you get jitter.
 
Imagine you’re speaking to someone on the phone and your voice is supposed to be delivered in packets, ten per second. If those packets are arriving evenly, every tenth of a second, your voice is smooth. If the timing gets out of whack and some packets arrive every twentieth of a second while others arrive every fifth of a second, your voice will sound choppy. That’s jitter.
 
Packet loss is when some data packets simply don’t arrive. If you’re speaking on the phone and suffering some packet loss, pieces of your conversation simply won’t be transmitted over the line.
 
Obviously, voice services suffering jitter and packet loss are bad for business.
 
So, what can you do?

Get Your Access & Voice From One Provider 

The reason for combining these services from a single provider is simple: it improves the user experience for both your staff and your customers.
 
When you combine your IP voice services such as SIP trunking, Hosted PBX, IP call centre, or Microsoft Skype and Teams with dedicated internet access from ThinkTel, your voice stays within our managed network, travelling a path from your business premises directly to one of our switches, where it interconnects with the PSTN available across Canada. We’re a national provider, so we provide the most direct and efficient voice paths. By taking the most direct and efficient voice paths, we can improve your quality of voice experience, minimizing jitter and packet loss.
 
And when you combine IP voice services with our dedicated internet access, we will have greater visibility into your company’s voice experience. Our operations and support teams actively measure and monitor your voice products, optimizing them in the process to ensure the best possible performance.
 
And for businesses that use Microsoft Skype and Teams, ThinkTel offers Direct Connect with the Azure cloud. This ensures the fastest and most efficient paths between your premises, our switches, PSTN interconnect, and the hosted Microsoft services.  

The Takeaway

By putting your voice and data traffic together on the same network, you’re choosing to prioritize communication quality and facilitate collaboration. And that’s good for your business.

Request a quote today!