How Can You Make VoIP Quality and Reliability Even Better Than Your Plain Old Telephone?
VoIP (Voice over IP) is everywhere in the core network. Even your plain old telephone service is converted into IP packets at one point in the core network and then transmitted over IP packet-switched networks. The latency and packet drops are negligible at the core network and therefore we can’t even tell the difference. However, if you want to go VoIP all the way to your office, the story is different.
The biggest roadblock in VoIP completely swapping out POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) has been the infamous last mile. The Achilles heel of VoIP is VoIP quality and is mainly caused by the unpredictable latency and reliability of WAN services such as DSL, cable, T1, DIA and MPLS. MPLS and T1 based DIA have been better in terms of reliability but not so much in terms of value, as they can be painfully slow in terms of speed and highly expensive. Especially when the same WAN links are carrying regular Internet traffic, VOIP quality can suffer big time.
The core advantage of VoIP is that it is packet switched, i.e. you can reroute the packets on different available paths, like Skype does in the core network. So why not do the same at the last mile, especially if you have access to multiple WAN links. That is what Mwave International did through their broadband bonding router. They bonded several DSL lines to leverage the higher bonded speed and the higher reliability of the aggregate WAN links. Many enterprises and SMBs are building and taking control of their own WAN connections, which is pretty smart, especially when your WAN connectivity is business critical.
Cahit Akin, CEO, Mushroom Networks, Inc.
Mushroom Networks is the provider of SD-WAN (Software Defined WAN) and NFV solutions capable of Broadband Bonding that enables self-healing WAN networks that route around network problems such as latency, jitter and packet loss.