Last week we covered all the things you need to worry about if you move your system to the cloud, Will the Cloud Still Be Your Friend On A Rainy Day?. This week we’re focusing on moving your phone system to the cloud.

Although moving your phone services to the cloud may seem like a slam dunk, there are many pitfalls that you need to be aware of. This is because the technology that hosted phone systems rely on, Voice over IP, is one of the most complex and most sensitive technologies currently available.

Not only do you need to worry about the issues we covered in last weeks’ blog post like Internet Access, Internet Performance, and the condition of your infrastructure but you also need to worry about performance factors that no one ever talks about unless you really dig in. I’m talking about latency, jitter, and dropped packets.

Latency is the time a packet of data takes to get from point A to point B.

Jitter is the variance in Latency.

Dropped Packets means that data packets just go missing or get corrupted.

They matter because in order to make a conversation sound natural, packets need to be flowing in at very consistent, predictable rate. For example, imagine the below sentence is being read through a voice call over the internet with very low latency and no jitter. It would sound something like this:

“UniVista is the Greatest!”

Now… add latency and jitter to the voice call and you get:

“U….niVista……..is the………..gre……at………..est!”

Lastly, if your internet service is really bad you also may get something called dropped packets. Now your call would sound something like this:

“U….ni……..……..is the………..gre……………..est!”

So, how do you eliminate Latency, Jitter and Dropped Packets? You really can’t. The best you can do is follow best practices by addressing everything we mentioned in last weeks’ blog post as well as manage your network’s traffic.

Hopefully that brings some clarity to the Voice over IP topic.  Keep in mind, Voice over IP is such a big topic that next month we’re devoting all of our blog posts to it, so stay tuned.

Your UniVista Team
*Celebrating 20 Years of Customer Satisfaction*