For the legions of new remote workers, making business calls from home is the new reality. Fortunately, most businesses use voice-over-IP (VoIP) phone services that make this easier than ever. You can assign your office phone extension to your PC so your calls from home seem no different to the recipient than if you’d been speaking from your desk at the office. But there is a lot more you can do.
Scheduling integration, smartphone apps that work on desktops and mobile devices, and collaboration capabilities, like video conferencing and whiteboarding, are just a few of the goodies your IT department might be using as part of your company’s VoIP subscription.
The core metric by which most people measure VoIP success is, well, voice. Is the call quality still as good as it was before your IT staff digitized your phone? And, these days, is it still as good now that you’re talking to customers or clients?
If conversations are garbled or drop sporadically, the other benefits of VoIP really don’t mean much. Fortunately, solutions such as our Editors’ Choice picks, Intermedia Unite and RingCentral, generally offer excellent voice quality. Even mid-tier solutions show a marked improvement over local telco systems and smartphones.
A lot of that quality depends on how the VoIP vendor engineers its solution. The other half is the network on which that solution runs. In pre-pandemic days, that was your IT department’s responsibility and they had a big tool kit to keep that office network running smoothly. These days, those same IT pros are faced with maintaining VoIP call quality on hundreds, even thousands of home networks, none of which they know or can access directly.
Fortunately, there are some simple steps you can take to to ensure your call quality clear. To help, we’ve put together this list of common fix-it measures.
1. Buy a New Headset
VoIP headsets range in price from really cheap $1 earpieces to $400 luxury headsets. You wouldn’t expect your favorite recording artist to mix an album using a cheap set of headphones, so why would you manage your business calls that way? When choosing a headset, there are a bunch of factors to consider. For one, if call quality is your main concern, choose noise-cancelling headphones that deliver sound in both ears. Corded and USB headsets typically deliver more stable sound quality than wireless or Bluetooth headsets.
Alternatively, you might consider ditching a headset for a SIP-compliant desktop phone. These will have speaker phones to help those who like to wander while they talk, or you can go for a wireless SIP phone. Those work just like their desktop counterparts, except they talk to your Wi-Fi network, so you’ll have full mobility around the office. Generally, you can get either of these phones pre-configured from your provider so they’re all set to work with your VoIP account simply by plugging them in or connecting them to your Wi-Fi network. This can solve many call quality problems before they start.
2. Make Sure Your Router Knows VoIP
Don’t simply dump new VoIP traffic on your standard home or small business router. Make sure your wireless router has the ability to expressly prioritize VoIP traffic over other types of data. Such routers can be as inexpensive as $200 or less for homes and small businesses or as expensive as $3,000 for more heavy-duty use. If you’re unsure how to tell this, your IT department can help you check as long as you’re able to access your router’s administration screens. If that’s not available, hit up your router’s help desk support line.
Routers prioritize traffic in different ways, especially home-oriented routers. These were likely intended mainly to prioritize game or streaming traffic, but you should be able to point those features at voice traffic, too. The problem is configuring them.
Most IT professionals are deal with this issue on a case-by-case basis, since the pandemic is a temporary situation. (Hopefully!) Home networks tend to have few enough users that adding the occasional call isn’t a problem. For those that have trouble, IT simply deals with it as best they can.
Figuring out how to give your IT pro remote access to your router is very helpful (your router maker’s customer support or online knowledge base should be able to help here), but at a minimum you should know the exact make and model of your router as well as the router’s support site, so you can give IT a place to start.
3. Dig Into Your Router’s Guts
If you’re more technically adept, you can also help your IT department, or even solve any issues by yourself, simply by investigating your router’s inner features. Home networks tend to use simpler router management apps than business-class routers, which often means advanced features, including those needed to protect specific app traffic like VoIP, can either be hidden or missing entirely. New routers, like wireless mesh systems, are excellent home solutions, but their management apps are specifically designed to let customers set them up quickly with no network knowledge required. That means default setup apps will likely gloss over a lot of potentially useful options.
Sometimes you can get around this limitation, but usually that requires a two-stage conversation with your router maker’s support desk. First, to determine if there’s a secondary and meatier management interface available for those with the know-how to use it, and second, whether that interface has the traffic protection features you need.
There are several such features that might help. The most popular is quality of service (QoS), not only because it’s effective but also because it’s a popular way to protect the game and streaming traffic home users usually care about. That means not only does this feature have a good chance of being available on a home router, it might also have an easy configuration interface, which means your homebound employees might be able to adjust it themselves without IT intervention.
Other traffic protection features include making sure your router supports the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), which helps to deliver data reliably between a VoIP client and the server. You or your IT pro might also want to explore the virtual LAN (VLAN) option. With VLANs you can effectively carve out a portion of your bandwidth and build a separate network on it, one that’s only running your voice traffic. This can help assure both quality and low latency.
4. Reduce Your Bandwidth
This is mostly for all those new home network users that have flooded VoIP service providers over the last few months. Whether you’re using a residential VoIP account or simply extending your business provider’s service to employees’ homes, these networks can still pose a special problem. That’s because home networks are generally centered around a single router that processes all traffic running across the network.
This means bandwidth use becomes a much more important consideration than on larger business networks. Lots of traffic running over the same network at the same time as a VoIP call doesn’t just eat up space in the pipe, it can also cause packet collisions, jitter, and other network hiccups that can impact your call quality.
In a small network situation, an easy way to combat those issues is to reduce the amount of bandwidth being used by other apps during your VoIP sessions. That’s an easy fix for people who live alone. But those living with other people, especially families with kids doing schoolwork, playing games, or streaming movies, might need more coordination. If you can’t order others off the network while your VoIP calling or holding a web meeting, then getting your IT department to help you set up QoS or a dedicated VLAN just for VoIP can be invaluable.
5. Interference Clearance
Phones with higher frequencies tend to produce interference. Your typical VoIP phone runs at 2.4GHz. However, there are also 5.8GHz phones on the market as well as a variety of 5GHz devices, including VoIP equipment. In general, the 2.4GHz band gives you a longer range, but its data throughput is slower. It can also be used by common home appliances, including microwaves and certain audio-visual devices like TVs. The 5GHz band provides less coverage, but where it does cover, data will flow faster. There are fewer home devices that will also compete for 5GHz, but certain smart home devices have begin using this frequency.
If you’re experiencing interference, then check to see on which frequency your phone is running. If you’ve got a 5.8GHz phone, then switch to a 2.4GHz phone (many phones let you choose). Also, most home and small business routers, as well as most wireless range extenders, also let you choose whether to run in the 2.4GHz versus 5GHz spectrums. Most can even run both simultaneously, allowing you to choose which devices (and therefore which traffic) will run in which spectrum.
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