Business VoIP is without a doubt quickly becoming a massive necessity for organisations of all sizes. By providing even the smallest teams with incredibly powerful features yet remaining affordable, everyone can be equipped with the tools they need to provide a professional image and experience. While the VoIP service itself might come with a cost savings, there are other costs… Read More »The Bottom Line
Money doesn’t solve all problems, and the same can be said for improving your network’s performance. Just because you are experiencing high latency and jitters within your business VoIP calls doesn’t mean that you should run right to your ISP and pay for a faster internet package. That could solve the issue, but it might not be the only problem.… Read More »Improving the Situation
So, what makes for an acceptable level of latency within your network, and what does latency begin to directly impact the quality of your VoIP calls and other services? Well, at the end of the day, the level of interruption or delay in your conversation will be subjective. But what we can do is determine at what level of delay,… Read More »So, What’s Acceptable?
It should go without saying at this point that since VoIP is sending your voice as data packets over the internet, it will be directly impacted by the latency on your network. This means that VoIP will be directly impacted by latency due to congestion, a lack of bandwidth to handle traffic, or restricting hardware and software configuration. With higher… Read More »Latency, Jitter, and VoIP
Thankfully, jitter is incredibly easy to spot. Just like with Packet Loss, jitter will result in jumbled calls with words or sentences out of order, and speakers interrupting each other. But, just like with latency, there is a direct way to measure jitter within a network. This is where our speed test will actually come in handy, because it can… Read More »Measuring Jitter With a Speed Test
Quite simply, jitter is most likely and commonly due to increased latency within a network, which is due to increased congestion. As I mentioned above: Network Congestion — probably the most obvious and common cause of jitter is simply an overcrowded network. If you have too many devices looked up to the same network, all being used at the same time,… Read More »What Increases Jitter?
While directly related to latency, jitter is not quite the exact same thing as latency. In fact, Cisco defines Jitter as “a variation in the delay of received packets,” meaning that Jitter is actually a differentiation within the latency (or delay) between each data packet. Packets are sent “in a continuous stream with the packets spaced evenly apart.” However, due to… Read More »What Is Jitter?
Since we ultimately understand that latency cannot be eliminated from existence, we need to understand how latency will impact VoIP calls. Essentially, we need a benchmark for which to measure against — an accepted level. Thankfully, measuring latency is actually fairly easy to do. Since network latency is the time it takes for a task to happen, we simply need… Read More »Measuring Latency with a Ping Test
Latency can actually be increased by a fair number of different factors, including: Network Hardware – For example, some routers can only transmit data at limited rates, and may have limited processing power. Wireless networks will generally have increased latency due to wireless interference, distance between devices, and the lack of stability that comes with a wired connection. For example, walls… Read More »What Increases Latency?
At its simplest definition, latency is simply a measured delay, the time it takes for a task to occur. For a more formal definition, latency is “the delay before a transfer of data begins following an instruction for its transfer.” Latency is generally also referred to as “lag,” and will be incredibly familiar to anyone who has played video games… Read More »What Is Latency?
