Learn About VoIP and Data Transmission Issues

Chris Bjorklund: You’re listening to the AllBusiness podcast. I’m Chris Bjorklund. If you’re getting this through iTunes and RSS feed or an online streaming-media player, you can hear interviews with other experts at AllBusiness.com.

Bjorklund: If you’ve read up on VoIP, voice over internet protocol, you’ve heard terms like latency, jitter, rebuffering, and packet loss. Andy Abramson from VoIP Watch talks about the challenges of data transmission with VoIP implementations.

Andy Abramson: You have things like packet loss, rebuffering, latency, and jitter. Those are all the evils of data transmission. They occur for a variety of reasons. One, your network may be under powered. Two, it may be too crowded. Three, there’s too much traffic going through the switches and they can’t handle it. Four, it’s being dumped into the public internet, not running over private networks where quality is maintained at 5-9. So a good VoIP provider, someone like a Junction Networks or a Cbeyond, they actually build their own networks inside the big internet so the calls travel over preferred lines. I refer to that as the high-speed lane on the highway versus the public internet which is everybody on the street, you know, driving where the stop lights, people cutting in and cutting out. So if you think of how it is to drive at HOV lane in California or any other part around the United States, you pretty much have clear sailing especially if you, you know, just pick it while there’s not a lot of traffic. It really flies. It’s like smooth ice. I used to be in the hockey business when I was younger and I always talked about smooth ice. When you first hit that ice, after the Zamboni comes off and you go skating across it. There’s nothing smoother. Well, a well-managed private network by a company like Junction Networks is a business great voice provider. You’re able to have that smooth-as-glass high-speed lane experience compared to someone who’s simply giving you a voice over IP system, plugging it into your office, connecting it into your internet network, and there’s no private network behind it, you’re going out into the open network. Well that’s like going down Market Street in San Francisco at 5 o’clock trying to get to the freeway. You’d never get there and even when you get on the freeway, it’s all stop and go. That’s what happens when you dump traffic into the public internet. There’s no quality of service. There’s no reliability. There are no guarantees how fast it’s going to get there. It’s the equivalent of third class mail.

Bjorklund: Many thanks to Andy Abramson for joining us today. His blog can be found at VoIP Watch, VoIPWatch.com. I’m Chris Bjorklund, thank you for listening.