With Hosted IVR and Click to Call included as part of a growing list of new telephone services that bring success and convenience to users, the need for improved communications and quality connections continues to also grow.

 

In a recent Ifbyphone Blog posting, CEO Irv Shapiro (News - Alert) highlights the importance of voice quality, especially as many new telephone services rely on VoIP connections.

 

As Shapiro notes in the blog: Why Does My VOIP Connection Sound So Bad?, service quality can range any where from great, to no better "than the walkie talkies your child recently received for Christmas."

 

Because traffic is transmitted over the public Internet, it can be difficult for non-techies to understand how quality is determined.

In the blog, Shapiro walks readers through a VoIP communication, "In VOIP communications your voice is converted from an analog wave into a series of data packets. These data packets, which share the Internet with email, web page transmissions and file transfers, are then transmitted from one computer to another where at the destination the data packets are converted back into a sound wave you can hear."

This is then followed by an important process of voice compression, which is key to how quality is achieved. Shapiro explains. "In a typical engineering trade off; the more we compress the voice transmission, the more conversations we can transmit over the same Internet connection. The other side of this trade off is that the more we compress the voice the worse it sounds."

To ensure that sound is as good as that of traditional phone calls, it is necessary to use G.711 as a compression standard.

"At Ifbyphone (News - Alert) we are committed to the delivery of high quality voice services designed for business customers. We exclusively use G.711 for our business services. Since many of our services rely on automated voice recognition we need to set very high voice standards for the recognition to function properly."

For more check out the Blog post HERE

Stefania Viscusi is an established writer and avid reader. To see more of her articles, please visit Stefania Viscusi’s columnist page.