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VoIP Quality & Guaranteed Service Levels

Greg Carter Technical Quicksheet

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There are two options for the quality of VoIP phone calls:
• Best Effort (the Public Internet)
• Guaranteed (a Private Network). Here you will get a Service Level Agreement (SLA).

There are cases when businesses require guaranteed phone call quality and reliability – hospitals, fire stations, police stations, call centers etc. But, most businesses do not require guaranteed service. Remember that the “Best Effort” internet is very reliable, massively redundant, and is much less expensive than the guaranteed. And note that guaranteed does not mean that it is 100% reliable. Guaranteed means that you will get a guaranteed minimum reliability and quality of service specified in a service level agreement.

Depending on what you need, here are some more facts:
• Quality of Service can only be guaranteed on dedicated private networks. By law, internet providers are prohibited from giving preferential treatment to any type of data, such as voice data, on the Public Internet. They can only provide VoIP QOS if they provide you a private dedicated connection to the VoIP service provider.
• You will have good VoIP phone call quality if:
o You choose, at a minimum, good quality business class broadband internet service. If you get an Ethernet connection to the Public Internet the QOS will be better.
o You purchase enough bandwidth for your peak data usage and the phone calls.
• You will have guaranteed VoIP phone call quality if you select a direct (dedicated) connection to your VoIP service which is usually redundant MPLS connections. Guaranteed is not perfect, but its quality is controlled from your business to the VoIP service provider. This is why they can guarantee some level of quality and reliability. This is typically very expensive, as you would need 2 MPLS connections.

*For more information please see our VoIP req & Internet options blog post