Quality matters when it comes to voice calling. There’s nothing more maddening than trying to talk with a family member and having to focus more on the call than what’s being said in the call. This is even more the case when it comes to important business calls.
Voice-over-IP brings many benefits, but one challenge it faces is quality. Early VoIP systems were known for their poor voice quality, and to some degree they are still known for it.
Part of this enduring reputation for poor quality stems from the way the Internet itself has typically worked.
As I noted in an article last year, traditional IP networks are connectionless, with the router taking each packet of data and determining the next hop on the delivery chain by using the destination IP address and information from its own forwarding table. This can be robust in the case of, say, nuclear war. But, it is not very efficient—and can lead to connections that are not always fast enough to support VoIP.
MPLS, on the other hand, improves upon the old system by making the delivery path less random. It does this by using pre-configured Label Switched Paths (LSP) connections.
MPLS, therefore, can ensure that voice quality is up to snuff when it comes to VoIP.
This is part of the reason why United Network Services, known as UNSi for short, recently acquired Airband Communications (News - Alert). UNSi, a next-generation carrier and provider of intelligent internet and managed services, picked up not only one of the nation’s largest fixed wireless voice and data providers with the purchase, it also grabbed one of the largest southwest and southeast MPLS backbones.
This added MPLS infrastructure has enabled UNSi to launch its new nationwide business cloud voice service, which was announced last week.
The company has repackaged Airband’s voice service as a cloud suite of voice services supported by UNSi’s CHAMP (Cloud, Hosted Applications & Messaging Platform). It now offers cloud-based VoIP nationwide. As part of the rollout, it has also added new features to the Airband service, such as voicemail to text.
One neat feature of the service is profile-based pricing, which allows a company to buy in for only the features it needs. Profiles can include receptionists, conference rooms, executives or office workers, for instance.
SVP of Strategic Planning and Business Development Allan Schwartz (News - Alert) said, “Businesses need reliability and redundancy. No one can be disconnected in today’s technologically dependent world. We tailored our solutions to include redundant connections to the Internet while providing a cost effective array of choices for today’s ever-changing communications landscape.”
Edited by Blaise McNamee