Quality of service and edge issues still top of VoIP woes
Just over 50 per cent of customers experiencing call drops and bad firewalls
Quality of service and edge issues are still the primary difficulties experienced by unified communications users running hosted VoIP (voice over IP) solutions, a recent report has revealed.
The SIP Survey 2016, carried out by UC&C blog nojitter.com has discovered that 27.49 per cent of users experience edge issues such as badly configured firewalls, NAT (network address translation) or SBC (session border controllers).
Meanwhile, the survey reveals that 22.81 per cent of users are still experiencing Qos (quality of service) issues such as delays on the line and call drops.
The two results together account for just over 50 per cent of hosted VoIP users, and raise serious questions about the dependability of networks.
Initial configuration issues accounted for a further 19.88 per cent of headaches, while remote configuration of cloud services came to 4.68 per cent. Hardware, meanwhile, was responsible for 7.6 per cent of issues, with the particular focus here on adding, moving or reconfiguring handsets and softphones.
The SIP Survey 2016 also found that "primary" issues with SIP trunking usually happen at the source, with the provider responsible for 33.63 per cent of faults, with edge concerns coming in again at 23.51 per cent of trunking woes.
However, perhaps more positively, 21.73 per cent of those surveyed had never experienced any SIP trunking problems at all.
The report points out how some of the reasons people gave for experiencing no problems with SIP trunking included good planning from their ISP, or good internal engineering teams.
Granular, specific testing of the network, including "all" call scenarios and types was also mooted.
Also, having "lots and lots" of bandwidth was cited, which is understandable as stacks of free-flowing data can mask a variety of sins.