VoIP Telephony technology: connecting over the Internet.

• Author: Lochner, Mary
• Position: TELECOM & TECHNOLOGY

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When most people think of dialing over the Internet, they think of the jittery, in-and-out connection associated with free services such as Skype. But cost savings, flexibility and increasing audio quality are all driving more businesses to migrate over to what are collectively called Voice over Internet Protocol, or VoIP, for their phone service.

In a June 26 report, market research firm TechNavio predicted it expects VoIP services world-wide to see 7.1 percent annual growth from 2011 to 2015.

"The sales have increased year over year," says GCI Sales Engineer Rodrigo "JR" Garcia.

He says GCI has offered VoIP systems for a long time, and offered VoIP services for a few years.

The VoIP systems are hardware systems installed at offices on-site that enable customers to use VoIP. They're often used by large companies and organizations. But a VoIP service makes the technology more affordable to a small or medium-sized business, Garcia says.

"Rather than having one of those expensive boxes on-site, which can cost upwards of tens of thousands of dollars," Garcia says, "we can provide the same VoIP services over the standard Internet or data connection."

The VoIP service GCI offers is what Garcia calls a hosted cloud voice solution. All that means, he says, is that the "brains" of the system are hosted at the telecom company's facility.

Data Line Determinations

But isn't the connection quality of a phone call held over the Internet notoriously bad? That doesn't have to be the case, says Alaska Communications Systems Vice President of Marketing Eric Lazo.

"A lot of consumers have the conversation on Skype and it starts to break up," he says. "It's because their data line is not provisioned for voice conversations; it's provisioned for downloading. It's not sized to do the cutting-edge technology they're trying to do."

He says the new VoIP systems and services packaged for businesses utilize an array of technological solutions that help improve the audio quality experienced by the user. Having enough bandwidth to deliver good voice quality is one part of that, Lazo says, but another involves setting up the system to prioritize voice communications going over the Internet medium as opposed to say, downloads.

Companies could save money using VoIP, Lazo says, but it's not necessarily in the area of bypassing long-distance or other conventional telephone fees. Yes, VoIP will save a little in that arena, he says, but the real...