How Well is VoIP Meeting Your Business Needs -- and How Do You Know?

Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) popularity and hype continue to grow, but challenges persist, especially for business users. Key among these: how do you assess, track and strive to improve quality and performance levels, especially when these are compared to the traditional land line "gold standard?" And how closely and regularly is your organization tracking total costs and comparing them to available alternatives? What are you measuring to determine whether VoIP is actually delivering business benefits, how are you doing the measuring, and how are your integrators, resellers and/or providers contributing to your efforts?

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Information Technology

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Michael Dortch

asked on Oct. 27, 2009

Terri Kelley

Network Engineer, Farm to Market Broadband

Posted on Oct. 27, 2009

It does well for us discounting the tech issues we sometimes face. In our case, our central office has one phone and the rest of our employees are remote. VOIP gives us a very good way to have a centralized phone system, local public phone number and a convenient way to communicate between each other (extensions). Also we use soft phones so the cost for a phone is nil and no physical phone line needed at each location, just at the server location. So for us, measuring the benefit is very easy. Basically we have the cost of a locally maintained VOIP server (asterisk) and that is it. That is maintained by the IT personnel who are already employed and paid for. Plus we have the benefit of a conference room where employees can "meet" without having to drive to a meeting location. Costs again come down.

So given our example, what are the costs and benefits as opposed to a traditional land line? Cost of IT personnel (external or internal), cost of the server and software (open source or not), cost of phones (soft or not) and other benefits such as the conference room mentioned.

Depending on your business, you may be able to market your VOIP service to others which may actually gain your business some income.

Most VOIP servers also offer ways to record and monitor calls as well as track various statistics such as call volume either as a whole or to a particular section or extension. That could improve quality control.

Terri