What affects voice quality?

Determining the reason for poor call quality should be a troubleshooting exercise any good telecommunications partner should be able to get to the bottom of.

The quality of the phone system is dictated by a lot of factors. It is not usually the fault of the SIP Trunk provider, though it’s always possible!

Using a Softphone

Ensure that your computer has enough resources to be able to do everything the user needs it to do, so when they are on a call, the lack of resources doesn’t affect call quality.

Quality of Headset

The quality of the headset picking up your voice is a huge factor. Headsets with a noise cancelling microphone and echo detection are must for busy work environments to make sure the person on the other end of the call isn’t hearing the conversation of the person behind you.

Bandwidth

Ensure your internet connection has enough bandwidth to support your call. You don’t need much speed to support VoIP, but if someone is saturating the bandwidth in a video conference, or downloading or watching a video online, you will run into quality issues.

A common practice is to implement QoS or Packet Prioritization.

This will make sure that VoIP traffic gets priority over all other traffic on the network ensuring that there is enough bandwidth for the VoIP call. If you are having issues with bandwidth, check which codec you are currently using and possibly change to one which requires less bandwidth. Find out a bit more about codecs here.

Quality of the other persons line

It is always possible that the other person could be using a dodgy provider for VoIP, could have aged handset/PBX equipment or be in bad reception using a mobile phone.

Aged networking hardware

It is best practise to have your computer (if using softphone) or physical phone plugged directly into a port on the core switch.

If switches or hubs are being daisy chained, this may be creating a bottleneck for network traffic and it’s possible your call will not have enough local bandwidth to reliability deliver good voice quality.

Latency between your office and the SIP trunk provider.

Aatrox communications is a premium SIP Trunk provider with redundant equipment in Melbourne and Sydney. The latency in Australia will not cause problems for anyone. Issues with latency starts happening when low-cost providers are hosting their equipment in Asia and other countries just outside of Australia. We are proud to offer a reliable, good quality service based in Australia.

We are always happy to give guidance to customers and partners on where to start with issues with voice quality.

Ultimately though your IT partner who is looking after your network will be best placed to diagnose and remediate any issues.

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