“The UCaaS market is accelerating at an annualized rate of 29% due to the continued erosion of on-premises PBX systems, which declined -11%, and the rapid pace of adoption among enterprises that are migrating to the cloud looking for richer and more cost-effective collaborative communication solutions,” says Jeremy Duke, Synergy Research Group’s founder and chief analyst.
Companies of all sizes can see the trend and they want to take advantage of it. They sign up with a provider and buy new IP-based phones as suggested by the provider, then they turn up the service only to discover that voice quality is substandard or unusable. Unlike PSTN, where a closed-loop, dedicated circuit ensures consistently good voice quality, VoIP traffic travels over shared, packet-switched networks. Packets follow the most efficient route in the network towards the destination.
This same route is used by everyone else connected to the Internet, for data flows as well as voice. Unfortunately, voice has different requirements than data in an IP network. Voice depends on lots of very small packets (50 packets per second per connection) all being transmitted in order and being placed on the network immediately. Data sharing applications, on the other hand, transmit huge chunks of data all at once. If nothing is done to remedy the situation, voice is constantly being delayed by data traffic, often to the point where it is unusable.
Quality of Service (QoS) is imperative for delivering reliable business communications over the Internet.
QoS involves classifying and prioritizing traffic throughout a network. That is, QoS enables you to establish an end-to-end traffic priority policy to improve control and throughput of important data. You can manage available bandwidth so that the most important traffic goes first. For example, you can use Quality of Service to:
- Upgrade or downgrade traffic from various servers
- Control the priority of traffic from dedicated VLANs or applications
- Change the priorities of traffic from various segments of your network as your business needs change.
- Set priority policies in edge switches in your network to enable traffic handling rules across the network.
RingCentral, a leading VoIP platform ensures the best quality of service for its customers by investing in the following areas to ensure the best end-user experience:
- Global private backbone – RingCentral platform is our own, purpose-built to perform as a highly redundant, reliable, and secure global communications network. Active-active architecture hosted in Tier-4 data centers and direct peering relationships with over 200 ISPs globally are some of our strong founding decisions that guarantee availability and voice quality.
- RingCentral Network Operations Center (NOC) – Our NOC teams and dedicated engineering resources focus relentlessly on delivering Quality of Service with smart call routing and 24/7/365 monitoring of quality metrics across all modes of communications.
- HD media – To consistently deliver the highest HD quality possible, RingCentral employs the advanced Opus Interactive codec, as well as the wideband G.722 codec. HD Voice with Opus codec is enabled by default on RingCentral apps, providing a better user experience with more clarity in HD Voice, especially in limited bandwidth environments.
- QoS Analytics – RingCentral Quality of Service Analytics gives administrators access to key operational QoS metrics in near real time to monitor the global voice quality and to diagnose call quality issues impacting users.
- Professional Services – Our Professional Services staff can help you set up, integrate, tailor, and extend your RingCentral service to meet specific business needs. We help conduct bandwidth analysis, make router and firewall recommendations, and assist with traffic prioritization efforts to help customers get properly configured to utilize our platform.
QoS is imperative for delivering reliable business communications over the Internet without reactively expanding or over-provisioning of networks.
To learn more about using QoS mechanisms, that employ resources efficiently and ensure the required level of service check out our approach and guidelines on QoS policies.
Originally published Mar 08, 2018, updated Dec 30, 2022