After over 100 years of being chained to a wall or antenna, VOIP has finally freed us to travel wherever we want without paying expensive long-distance costs or having to change our phone numbers. Now, you could literally run a business from China, while maintaining a Manhattan phone number. All you need is a laptop and a good set of headphones.
This means you can have a Madison Avenue business without the high New York City rent.But once in a while, you may have problems. Your voice might come off as robotic, or there may be an echo on the other end. If your clients are complaining that your phone sounds odd, you may want to try some of the advice outlined in this article.
First, you’ll want to hear what you sound like by calling a remote phone number and leaving a recorded message. Since your upload speeds are usually much faster than your download speeds, it’s very possible that you may hear the other party fine… even though your voice is completely distorted.
At first, you may think that bandwidth is the problem. But it probably isn’t. When it comes to the clarity of your VOIP calls, your PING rate is a much more important factor.
Visit pingtest.net to test the clarity of your connection. A standard test will do in most cases. But long-distance workers should also try test server in an area that they often call into.
The PING test will give you a few important numbers. The most important one is the packet loss. If this number is anything other than 0%, your voice may break up and sound robotic. This is often caused by noise on the ADSL phone line, or a weak wireless connection.
The best cure for this kind of problem is to connect your computer directly into the Internet router, rather than using a wireless connection. Also, you should use a phone to see if you hear static on the ADSL phone line. If so, call your phone company for a solution.
The other important number is the PING time. If this number is anything higher than 100ms, you may hear long pauses when talking to the other party. Also, long ping times can cause your VOIP connections to hang up suddenly.
If the PING is fine, you may also want to check your computer for viruses. Hackers often rely on viruses to send out internet spam through infected computers. If this happens, your outgoing connection may be getting clogged up.
If you’re still having problems at this point, you may want to look into your VOIP provider’s documentation for other possible solutions. But the information laid out above should be sufficient to solve at least 90% of the most common problem cases.
This guest article was written by Paul Rudo. For the latest articles on business technology, you can visit Paul Rudo’s blog at http://enterprisefeatures.com
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