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Voice-over-IP (VoIP) is only as good as its call quality.

If a customer tries to use VoIP and he can’t understand the person on the other end, it tells the user that the VoIP service is not to be relied upon. If a person tries to make a call and can’t even connect to the phone network, it says that the VoIP service isn’t even useful. Both are epic fails.

VoIP must perform when customers try to use it. If email is delayed, nobody notices because we don’t know exactly when it was sent. If we try a videoconference and it doesn’t work so well, we grumble but half expect it. But when our phone doesn’t work, we look elsewhere. We’ve come to expect reliable phone service, so this is the standard most of us hold to VoIP; it must always work.

Yet, VoIP relies on the Internet, including the local connection to the Internet. While the VoIP provider might have a high-availability data center behind its operation, and it may have a peering relationship that ensures that calls are not bottlenecked on the backbone, it is hard to protect against infrastructure failures that originate at the caller’s router.

No matter how good the infrastructure, VoIP providers can have their service fall flat if the customer is in an area with poor Internet connectivity.

This is why bandwidth optimization is so important. VoIP providers need to minimize how much their calling solution requires of the Internet, because a VoIP service that demands a lot of bandwidth sounds good in Silicon Valley, but can be another story in the backwoods of Appalachia. If the bandwidth requirements are minimal, however, there will be less cases when callers experience trouble with their connections.

If avoiding an epic fail is important for a VoIP provider, they need to optimize bandwidth.

One interesting solution to this problem is iTel Bye Saver by REVE Systems. iTel Byte Saver is a server-side software application that helps VoIP service providers offer services to those clients or geographies where Internet connectivity is a challenge.

Through good compression and tunneling technology, amazingly the iTel Byte Saver solution can cut bandwidth usage by up to 70 percent.

REVE Systems says on their web site that calls made from their iTel Mobile Dialer Express on G.729 codec consumes 25 kbps, but when the dialer is used in conjunction with Byte Saver it can be as low as 9.6 kbps. That’s a significant savings!

Call quality is a nonnegotiable for VoIP in 2014, but to ensure high quality it is necessary to have good bandwidth optimization. The cost of not preparing for bandwidth-challenged areas is definitely the loss of customers. There’s just too much competition for customers to put up with bad call quality.