Three tips to get the best call quality from Cloud Voice

Smithville provides access to the highest quality voice-over-Internet service to your business. To ensure you experience the best call quality, please review your network infrastructure to prevent any dropped calls, jitter (delay variation), and latency in the future. Here are three tips to help you:

1. Ensure you have adequate bandwidth to concurrently support your data and voice needs.

Voice traffic runs concurrently with your network’s data traffic. When there isn’t enough bandwidth to support them both, you’ll experience bottlenecking and reduced call quality.

TIP: We advise evaluating your bandwidth usage at your peak rate when you’ll also be using phones. If you see your network slow down during this time, consider upgrading your Internet bandwidth to ensure that even at peak usage, enough bandwidth is available to support additional voice traffic.

2. Adequate equipment and cabling are essential.

Speed alone doesn’t guarantee the best results for Cloud Voice. Older routers or network equipment, including cables, can directly impair Cloud Voice call quality.

TIP: An ethernet cable should connect to each VoIP phone. At a minimum, use a Cat5 cable, which tops out at 10/100Mbps, up to 100 MHz. We strongly recommended Cat5e or Cat6 cables to ensure transmission speed is at 1gigabit and sufficient for the data needed to support your needs.

3. Prioritize, segment, and prevent data traffic issues.

When multiple data and voice applications run regularly on your LAN, the data traffic can interfere with voice traffic.

TIP: Protocols on your network should separate and prioritize the voice traffic. If you are unsure how to create these protocols, please visit your network equipment manufacturer’s website for further directions.

• Enable QoS on your network equipment by prioritizing the voice traffic over other data traffic.
• Create a VLAN for your voice traffic. To physically separate traffic, install a separate data jack for each new phone that connects to your network, or you can create a traditional VLAN logically on your network equipment. If your equipment supports Voice VLAN or Voice signaling VLAN, this further directs the voice traffic to the appropriate VLAN.
• Prevent packet loss by increasing buffer size and consider implementing avoidance protocols like Weighted Random Early Detection (WRED). The industry’s acceptable end-to-end delay for VoIP packets is 150 to 200 Ms. as well as jitter less than 30ms.

With adequate equipment, cabling, and network protocols you will have taken the recommended steps to ensure you are experiencing the best call quality for your business.