* Sage advice from a hosted VoIP provider
Last week, we looked at what consumers and small office/home office VoIP users can do to ensure VoIP call quality. This week, we’d like to offer some suggestions about what the enterprise can do from a business and education perspective to improve their VoIP experience.
Our advice today comes from Dan Hoffman, president and CEO of M5 Networks. M5 offers hosted VoIP to small and midsize businesses and has a large presence in the New York metro area. It was one of the early providers of hosted VoIP and offers its advice with about 7 years of experience with VoIP networks.
Hoffman’s first piece of advice for those considering a hosted VoIP service: Ask your peers about their experiences with VoIP. He recommends that when seeking out a peer recommendation, the potential hosted-VoIP customer should talk with someone who has actually used a hosted VoIP service for a year or more and who, if possible, has a similar-sized company or who has similar network requirements.
His second most important recommendation is for users to understand the difference between a public and private link and to understand the difference between a managed and an unmanaged service. A private link offers users (and the service provider) more control over their connection when compared to a public link. And a managed service that includes service provider responsibility for the customer data network terminals is also going to offer less chance for QoS failures than an unmanaged service.
Third, Hoffman recommends that IT managers must understand what is the customer’s responsibility and what is the service provider’s responsibility – at all levels of the organization. He suggests that while a network readiness assessment is vital, a people readiness assessment is equally as important to make sure both users and internal staff are ready for the world of VoIP.
Next time, we’ll get Hoffman’s words of wisdom about what premise-based VoIP users should consider.
