Is VoIP reliable for small businesses?

The recent 48 hour outage of Skype has underlined the fact that many small businesses may not want to cut off their traditional phone services just yet. Many experts agree that it’s risky for small businesses to rely too heavily on services that use voice over IP technology that leverages the public internet, for the simple reason that the public internet is still what is considered a best-effort network.

Priority is not given to any type of traffic once it hits the public internet. Even though voice packets don’t take up much bandwidth, the technology is very sensitive to latency, which means that late arriving packets could distort voice quality or cut off voice calls altogether.

While dropped calls or garbled connections may be tolerated by some consumers, business users generally have higher expectations for quality and reliability. Performance of the network is still considered to be largely unpredictable.

Large companies deploying VoIP technology from suppliers such as Cisco and Avaya, use their own IP networks to transport calls within their campuses, and do not use the public internet to transport their voice traffic. For calls travelling to other branch offices, they use leased data links rented from service providers like Verizon or AT&T. As a result, large VoIP installations often require companies to invest millions of dollars to upgrade their local-area and wide-area network infrastructures.

These enterprise-class VoIP systems are too expensive for companies with fewer than 50 or 100 employees, and even the small-business offerings from Cisco and Avaya are often too expensive for many small companies.

Skype claims that almost 30% of the 220 million people who have downloaded its peer-to-peer calling software client around the globe use the service for business purposes. But Skype maintains it is not intended for enterprise-level needs, and the company has always encouraged customers to have back-up communications.

Small businesses, however, should find it a very useful tool that complements their existing communications methods, and helps them reduce communication costs and increase productivity. So an internet-based VoIP solution may hit the right price point, but call quality and service reliability may suffer. Compromises will still have to be made.