Business VoIP deployment with the network engineering that makes it work — traffic prioritisation, connection assessment, number porting and handset rollout.
The phone system is a network application
The single most useful thing to understand about VoIP is that choosing a provider is the small decision. The network underneath is where call quality is won or lost, and it is the part most deployments skip.
Voice needs very little bandwidth — around 100 kbps per concurrent call, so ten simultaneous calls is a rounding error on any business connection. What it needs is consistency. Voice packets arriving late or out of order produce the robotic, choppy audio everyone associates with bad VoIP, and a connection that feels perfectly fine for browsing and email can deliver exactly that.
Why calls break up
Two causes account for most complaints.
No traffic prioritisation. Without quality of service configured, voice queues behind everything else on the link. Calls are clear until someone uploads a large file, a backup kicks off or a cloud sync starts, and then they degrade. This is the most common cause by a wide margin, and it is a configuration fix rather than a provider problem.
An inadequate router. Consumer or older business routers that cannot handle the session volume, or that have SIP handling features that actively interfere.
Worth knowing because if your current VoIP service has poor quality, changing provider may fix nothing. We would rather test and tell you it is the network.
What we do before deployment
Measure the connection — bandwidth, latency, jitter and packet loss — on your actual service, under real conditions rather than at 6am.
Then configure the network: quality of service to prioritise voice, a separate VLAN for handsets where it makes sense, and a check that the switch has PoE capacity for the handsets being added. See network management for how that fits with the rest.
Only then does the phone system design matter.
Porting numbers
Your existing numbers move with you in almost all cases. Porting is coordinated with the current carrier on a scheduled date, with the old service live until it completes so there is no gap.
The complications are commercial rather than technical — numbers bundled into a contract, or a carrier being slow. That is our problem to manage, not yours.
Handsets, or not
Plenty of businesses no longer buy desk phones. A softphone on a laptop with a good headset covers most office roles, and it means the same extension works from home.
Handsets still make sense at reception, in warehouses and workshops, in meeting rooms, and for anyone on calls all day. Deciding per role rather than per desk usually reduces the hardware bill noticeably.
Which platform
We deploy AnalytiCall — our sister company’s platform — and Microsoft Teams Phone. We will tell you which suits your stack, including when the answer is the one we are not related to.