Over the last few years, much has changed regarding how we live and work, with the biggest difference being the shift from working in an office to working from home. That means you need access to work tools in your home office, and the most fundamental one is a phone line.
Many businesses have transitioned to voice-over-IP (VoIP) phone services, which connect calls over the internet rather than conventional phone lines. This means it's relatively easy for a remote IT department to install and manage a phone line for you, as long as you have a high-speed internet connection in your home. In fact, many people choose residential VoIP for their personal home phones because of the attractive features it provides.
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4.0 Excellent See all (5 items)Businesses choose VoIP because it provides much more than voice calling. Scheduling integration, smartphone apps that work on desktops and mobile devices, and collaboration capabilities, such as video conferencing and whiteboarding, are just a few of the goodies your IT department might use as part of your company's VoIP subscription. Even your personal line can benefit from features like three-way calling, flexible voicemail, and ring hunt groups.
Still, the core metric by which most people measure VoIP success is call quality. Most VoIP services offer reliable and excellent-sounding calls out of the box. But what if yours doesn't? What if your previously clear calls have become garbled or sometimes drop altogether? Whether you're dialing an important client or a trusted friend, poor call quality can stifle communications, reduce engagement, and leave all participants with a poor impression.
There are many reasons why VoIP call quality can degrade over time. Unfortunately, the reality of remote work means you probably don't have immediate access to a fully staffed and stocked IT team to help resolve the problem. That doesn't mean you're helpless! Read on for useful tips that can help you root out the source of your VoIP problems at home, and prevent them in the future.
(Credit: nito/Shutterstock)1. Buy Quality Phone Equipment
If you use a headset for your VoIP calls, that's often the first place to look for trouble. Phone headsets range 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. If call quality is your main concern, choose noise-canceling headphones that deliver sound in both ears. Corded and USB headsets typically deliver stabler sound quality than wireless or Bluetooth ones.
Many residential VoIP providers ship their customers adapters, essentially digital phone jacks that let you plug in any conventional phone to place and receive basic VoIP calls. Business VoIP systems typically provide an app that lets you use your PC or smartphone to place and receive calls. But these may not be your only options.
Most VoIP providers (including some residential ones) also support SIP-compliant phones. These are desktop phones with features, such as speakerphone and multi-line hold, that you typically see in offices. They can also take the form of special wireless handsets. These phones natively support the session initiation protocol (SIP), one of the foundational technologies behind VoIP, which solves many call quality problems before they start. Ask your IT staff about your options. If you're paying for your own residential VoIP, you may be able to buy them pre-configured from your service provider.
2. Make Sure Your Router Knows VoIP
Don't simply dump new VoIP traffic on your standard home or small business router. Ensure your wireless router can expressly prioritize VoIP traffic over other data types. If you're not sure whether yours qualifies, contact your router manufacturer's help desk support line. Failing that, many VoIP service providers keep a list of supported equipment. If it turns out that yours needs replacement, VoIP-aware routers suitable for home-office use typically cost less than $300.
Routers prioritize traffic in various ways, and VoIP calls are not what home-oriented routers typically look for by default. More likely, they'll ship configured to prioritize video game or video streaming traffic. You should be able to point your router to voice traffic, but the challenge is configuring it.
If you don't know where to start, getting assistance from an IT professional is the best bet. The trouble there is that if you're a remote worker and your IT department doesn't do house calls, you'll need to make sure they can access your router's administration settings via the internet. Learning how to do that can be a challenge all of its own. Your IT department may be able to do some research to assist you. Still, at a minimum, you should know the exact make and model of your router and 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 roll up your sleeves and investigate your router's inner features on your own. Be aware, though, that home router manufacturers tend to ship their equipment with much more superficial management apps than you'd expect of business-class networking equipment. That's especially true of end-to-end products like wireless mesh systems. Those products tend to have quick mobile setup apps that often gloss over potentially useful options. Home router makers do this to make managing a router easier for the average person, but it often means that advanced features, including those needed to prioritize traffic for specific apps like VoIP, can either be hidden or missing.
If you have them, however, several features might help. The most popular is quality of service (QoS), mainly because it can be used to prioritize and protect the game and streaming traffic that's so common on home networks. But QoS systems can similarly be used to prioritize VoIP traffic, though understanding the right settings can be challenging if your router manufacturer hasn't designed the UI to guide you through the process.
Other traffic protection features include ensuring your router directly supports the SIP protocol, discussed above, which helps to deliver data reliably between a VoIP client and the server. Some higher-end routers offer support for virtual LANs (VLANs). These let you effectively carve out a portion of your bandwidth and build a separate network that's only running your voice traffic. That, in turn, lowers network latency, which translates directly into better call quality.
(Credit: Jeffery Coolidge / Getty Images)4. Avoid Bandwidth Congestion
Most homes have access to high-speed internet connections, especially in metropolitan areas. But as the average residential internet bandwidth has increased, so has usage. Today, it's not uncommon for a home to stream high-resolution video to multiple devices at once, and that traffic has to compete with online gaming, large file downloads, and other bandwidth sinks. All of this means some home networks are getting choked up.
A congested network is still a problem even if you're using a residential VoIP service, because home networks center around a single router that processes all your traffic. If that device is overloaded, your whole network suffers. Lots of traffic running over a single network simultaneous to 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, one way to combat those issues is to reduce the bandwidth used by other apps during your VoIP sessions. That's an easy fix for people who live alone. Anyone living with other people, especially families with kids doing schoolwork, playing games, or streaming movies, might need more coordination. If you have a lower-speed internet connection, consider asking the people in your household to limit their high-bandwidth activities to evening hours.
5. Avoid Wireless Interference
At one time, setting up a home network meant dragging wires and connecting equipment. These days, though, many home offices have evolved into an entirely wireless world, including Bluetooth, mobile data, and Wi-Fi. That, in itself, can be a problem, particularly if you're using wireless VoIP phone equipment.
Your typical VoIP phone runs at 2.4GHz. However, there are also 5.8GHz phones on the market and a variety of 5GHz devices. In general, the 2.4GHz band offers greater range, but its data throughput is slower. Home appliances also commonly use it, including microwaves and specific audio-visual devices like TVs. This kind of wireless interference is particularly prone to disrupt VoIP call quality. If you're experiencing it, check to see which frequency your phone is running. If you've got a 5.8GHz phone, switch to a 2.4GHz phone (many phones let you choose).
Another consideration is that most home and small business routers and wireless range extenders now let you decide whether to run in the 2.4GHz versus 5GHz spectrums. Most can even run both simultaneously, letting you choose the devices (and therefore which traffic) that run in each spectrum.
If you have such a dual-band router, check to see if you can designate the less congested 5GHz band for tasks that require low latency, such as streaming media and VoIP. The 5GHz band has more non-overlapping channels, particularly the higher channels ranging from 150 and above, that support more bandwidth than the lower channels. Meanwhile, the 2.4GHz band can be reserved for activities such as downloads.
5 Things to Think About When Choosing a Business Phone System6. Dip Your Toe Into Network Monitoring
If you've got some technical chops, or at least you're not intimidated by network technology, learning to use a network monitoring tool can be an excellent addition to your troubleshooting toolbox. Our favorite for tech-savvy home users is our Editors' Choice winner, Paessler PRTG. Although the PRTG's paid version is meant for far more complex networks than your average home setup, it has a freeware tier perfect for small networks. It also offers several features you can use to understand what's happening on your network if your call quality starts dropping.
An essential network test for diagnosing VoIP call quality is measuring your network's jitter, which is closely related to network delay and latency. These times measure how long data takes to get from one point on your network to another. It means your network performance fluctuates depending on where the call is going. A little jitter is expected on any network, but too much requires attention.
A tool like PRTG makes running a jitter test much easier because it has a one-button round-trip packet test built-in. Even better, it's got a monitor specifically designed to detect jitter, warn you about it, and even tell you where the problem lies. Once you know that, you can fix it with PRTG and your router. The best way is usually to set up QoS for your VoIP calls (see above). Again, PRTG simplifies matters since it identifies your VoIP packets, making configuring QoS on your router that much easier.
7. Shop Around
A big reason why PCMag tests and reviews business and residential VoIP providers is that not all of them are created equal. Beyond features and price, VoIP providers offer varying degrees of customer service, which makes a difference when you need support in resolving call-quality issues. What's more, some VoIP systems may be limited by flaws in how they were engineered.
Migrating large organizations from one business VoIP system to another can be highly burdensome. However, transitioning smaller organizations with fewer users to support is an easier task. And individuals using residential VoIP systems should feel free to size up their current provider to the competition, who will often welcome a direct comparison.
Similarly, internet service providers (ISPs) vary in quality, and network outages aren't the only problem. As mentioned earlier, VoIP traffic is far more vulnerable to unreliable network conditions than, for example, web browsing. If you've never had trouble reading news stories or sending email, but you just can't seem to get VoIP right, it could be that your internet connection isn't as consistently stable as you need it to be.
Unfortunately, many residential areas in North America and worldwide are still subject to effective monopolies for internet access. If that's the case in your region, there simply is no alternative to your current provider. But if you have more than one option, take advantage of that buying power to resolve your network issues, whether that means switching services or pressuring your current provider to address your concerns.
If you want to learn more about how to use VoIP more effectively, read our independent VoIP service reviews, and check out our advice on how to future-proof your business VoIP for remote work.
