Landlines may not be quite dead, but with businesses needing to do everything they can to get the most out of their telecom provider, the traditional telephone is slowly giving way to VoIP. The benefits that businesses can reap from VoIP are enormous, but one has to know how. To that end, SipVine has released a whitepaper that explains the whys and what's along with do’s and don’ts of VoIP.

Having dived into the ocean of VoIP, it's good to know how to swim and how to guard oneself against the currents. Regardless of whether the company is small or big, and immaterial of what infrastructure is already there, VoIP definitely needs one thing – a broadband connection. Herein lies the crux: Bandwidth (News - Alert)-users will require more or less bandwidth depending on the kinds of services they offer, the number of employees and so forth. The failure of the early Internet phones can be traced to a lack of bandwidth.

So how much bandwidth is enough? M. A. Greim of SipVine says it's a simple calculation. According to him, a single voice call requires 80k of bandwidth. So if there are 10 calls at the same time, the system would need 800k of bandwidth, which a compression codec can reduce to 25k per call.

But ISPs tend to “often exaggerate the amount their plans will give,” hence Greim states that it’s important to do actual testing to determine this. He advises businesses to do multiple tests at different times of the day to see whether surges in call volumes will be affected because of insufficient bandwidth. 

But bandwidth, though important, isn't the end of the story. Greim explains that software is equally if not more important and the quality of software will determine how much of bandwidth is used -- the better the software, the less the bandwidth required. The same goes for equipment; good equipment causes good outputs. Here, the word “good” should not be confused with “expensive,” for there are good options in the mid-range that give good outputs without breaking the bank.

Of course, you'll need to make sure your phones can communicate over VoIP, check out whether the local network can support VoIP, and decide whether you want premise-based or hosted VoIP – in short do your homework well before VoIPing. It could turn out to be a white elephant for you.