5 "Secrets" To Being Confident You Have Enough Bandwidth for VoIP
Posted by Scott Morris on Mon, Sep 27, 2010 @ 03:18 PM
Not having enough bandwidth for a VoIP phone system can be devastating - to you, to your business, to the company who sold you the system...and it is very avoidable.
Here are 5 "secrets" to being confident that you have enough bandwidth for implementing a Voice over IP phone system.
- Secret #1:Write down your current bandwidth. Don't guess. Don't think. Look it up and write it down. That number is important. If you don't know it, I found an awesome tool you can use: Bandwidth.com's VoIP Test. Really clean, tells you your current download speed and upload speed. They are a 'competitor' of ours (though much bigger) and have a lot of great info on their site as well.
- Secret #2: Be clear how much bandwidth 1 phone call takes on your VoIP solution. Most phone calls take between 80 and 100 kbps. Find out and write that number down.
- Secret #3: Figure out how many "concurrent" phone calls your company will need. Concurrent basically means "at the same time." (and yes, I had to look it up) So, be aware over the next couple days: How many people do we have on the phones all at once? What is the highest number of people that you think your company will need on the phones all at the same time. Write that number down.
- Secret #4: Get an understanding of your data usage. Does your company send and receive a lot of huge files? Do most people just use email and a bit of web surfing? This is hard to put a number too, but you've got to at least have a sense of whether you use a lot of bandwidth or a little bit of bandwidth.
- Secret #5: Leave yourself some margin! From experience, I can tell you that figuring out how much bandwidth you need and then trying to cut costs by getting as close to that as possible is just a bad idea. Give your self 1/2M to 1M margin on your internet bandwidth.
Would you like to download our eBook on this (with free "bandwidth equation-calculator fill in the blank form!")?
