How SD-WAN Can Fix Your VoIP Problems

Many businesses trying to modernize and “future-proof” their phone systems turn to VoIP and expect all their communication problems to disappear.

VoIP has a ton of undeniable benefits but to say that it is without any problems at all would be dishonest.

When a VoIP phone system works as it should, a business has a streamlined, consistent, and scalable communications system in place.

It’s in these businesses’ best interest to identify and solve any problems that pop up so they can maximize the most out of their VoIP phone system.

Let’s look at some of the common problems businesses face when their VoIP phone system isn’t working correctly.

Distortion

Distortion is when the speaker’s voice sounds glitched and almost robotic. Sometimes distortion can be a distraction, but it can make any call impossible if it gets worse.

Choppiness

Choppiness is when there are gaps, or hiccups, randomly throughout the call. Sometimes it’s just a word here or there. Other times it can be complete sentences.

Lag

Lag is when one or more callers are on a delay, making back and forth conversation impossible. This can lead to many callers speaking at the same time, which just furthers frustrations.

Dropped Calls

Dropped calls are when one or more callers get disconnected without warning and have to rejoin if they want to continue the conversation manually.

Straight to Voicemail

This happens when someone calls an available and connected line, but the caller is immediately sent to voicemail. The recipient of the call will not be aware of the caller until they check their messages.

Low or Fluctuating Quality

Low or fluctuating quality is when the clarity and crispness of the call varies. The speaker may not know it’s happening, but the other callers will have trouble staying engaged and paying attention.

All of these problems harm the business that’s experiencing them. For meetings and presentations, the recipients can completely miss critical information and not even know it.

Plus, it can be challenging for a team to maintain focus when a call has massive drops and problems.

Things are just worse for sales calls! Most customers don’t have a lot of time, so drops in quality or full disconnects can make a business lose a potential long-time customer.

When a business tries to fix this, they’ll usually find this frustrating experience:

A business has poor call quality or disconnects, so they contact their VoIP provider. The provider checks their server, sees it’s working as intended and tells the business to check with their internet provider.

The business goes ahead and calls their internet provider only to hear that the provider’s network is up and running perfectly and that they should contact their VoIP provider.

Frustrations just build because the business cannot find a solution, and they are losing potential customers every second.

In this situation, more often than not, each server is working as intended.

But how does that make sense?

Here’s the thing about your internet: even if you’re paying for the best of the best, your internet is going to have disconnections and varying speeds every single day.

That’s just how it works.

Most of our daily internet activities were designed around this problem and have built-in measures so you, the end-user, aren’t even aware of these problems.

That is until you started using a VoIP phone system.

VoIP phone systems, on their own, are not accustomed to these frequent delays and disconnects, and you can tell when the quality of calls starts to falter.

But, there is an easy solution.

All you need is software that is constantly checking internet connections and, should that connection become poor or even disconnect, reroutes to another connection without you even noticing.

And there is such software already!

It’s called SD-WAN, which stands for Software-Defined Wide Area Network.

Basically, the SD-WAN will ensure that your internet connection stays steady by detecting outages and delays and rerouting your connection to a stronger one or resending your data on a single connection, so you don’t experience a delay or disconnect.

But, before you run out and get yourself an SD-WAN, you need to know that they are not all the same.

The internet is fast, and your SD-WAN needs to be faster.

Real-time corrections are imperative. Before you buy, make sure your SD-WAN solution offers real-time dynamic Quality of Service (QoS).

Not every single connection is the same and, depending on your settings, your SD-WAN won’t be ‘allowed’ to access all of them, meaning you may still experience a delay or disconnect.

But with a real-time dynamic QoS, your SD-WAN will be able to jump across multiple connections, even with different bandwidths, without a drop in performance.

VoIP phone systems are the future for businesses. They offer benefits and features that you just can’t find anywhere else. And with an SD-WAN, you’ll be able to get the most out of your phone system without having to settle for poor audio quality, dropped calls, or any of these common problems.

Not sure where to start? The Garam Group has the SD-WAN solution that you need.