I work in VoIP business development. One thing that I have noticed when it comes to business deployment of VoIP is that the quality of service is almost entirely dependent upon the internet service provider (ISP). I found out today, in fact, that Verizon has a connection reset function on their DSL accounts that actually cuts long duration connections in order to cut down on torrent downloads. As you can imagine, this can cut off long phone conversations and bring grief to a VoIP customer. Typically we are finding that if we supply a data T1 and the hosted PBX phone service we can cut out many of these types of issues. What is even more amazing is that we have 3.8 (out of 4.0) mean opinion (MOS) call quality on a hosted PBX model using a dedicated data T1 across the public internet without utilizing any sort of long-haul QoS.
All in all, it really comes down to who your internet provider is and the expectations that were given to you pre and post sale. No, VoIP, will not guarantee 100% uptime, but really, neither can POTS (Plain Old Telephone System). With a business class VoIP softswitch I can give triple 9 reliability. All rates, savings, and features aside, can your local POTS provider guarantee that?
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