What are the disadvantages of VoIP?

VoIP is technology enabling voice and video calls to be made over the Internet. Given that VoIP calls are, on most occasions, free if not still very inexpensive by Lifewire’s reckoning, it’s clear why millions of individuals and companies have opted for VoIP.

However, whether your company already has a VoIP system or continues to mull over the idea, ask: “What are the disadvantages of VoIP?” Knowing these pitfalls can help you to get around them.

Potential sacrifices in voice quality

When conversing with someone on a VoIP call, you want to be able to hear their voice unhindered by noise, echo or other strange, unwanted sounds. However, with VoIP, the actual voice quality you get can be affected by various factors, including your hardware and broadband connection.

Call clarity can also depend on your VoIP provider’s service; however, with a VoIP service from Planet Telecom, you can expect voices to come through in crystal clarity.

VoIP can be hurt by choked bandwidth

In a workplace, VoIP is likely to be deployed over a high-speed broadband connection also used for downloading data and sending emails; this can further help answer the question of VoIP pitfalls…

Putting so much pressure on just one connection can clog up the bandwidth and so leave too little for your VoIP system to run reliably. Assessing how many people will simultaneously use that connection, and thus the total bandwidth your company requires,can be challenging.

VoIP’s effectiveness depends on a strong connection

Since your VoIP service will go entirely through your corporate broadband connection, your phone line will go down if the connection does so. Basically, without a working internet connection, you won’t have a functional phone system. This situation also helps clarify the issue of VoIP drawbacks.

Even if the connection stays intact, it could still become weaker – and, thus, hamper call quality. This would hardly portray a professional image to the people you attempt to speak to on affected calls.

“I’ve got the power”… and your VoIP system will need it

While PTSN phones don’t need to be plugged into an electric power supply to work, this is not the case with Voice over IP, as VoIP can be called in an unabbreviated fashion. Before making any phone calls over VoIP, you will have to plug hardware – like a modem, router or ATA – to the supply.

One rather worrying implication of all of this is that, should a power cut hit the area where your business is based, you won’t be able to use your VoIP telephone services until power is restored.

A VoIP system can have various security holes

What are the disadvantages of VoIP? For especially security-conscious users, they can include common security issues to which VoIP is prone – including viruses, malware, spamming, call tampering, phishing attacks and identity and service theft.

However, rest assured that it is very rare for viruses, worms and hacking to compromise VoIP security, says HowStuffWorks. VoIP developers are building encryption for countering such threats.

You could miss out on valuable calls

If calls typically prove your company’s financial lifeblood, it would understandably be excruciating to see many promising calls dropped due to an unreliable VoIP system. Small businesses could especially suffer from missing calls that could have helped them to establish fresh revenue streams.

For this reason, if you haven’t yet transferred your company to a whole online VoIP system, you might want to tap into many benefits of one while keeping the firm’s traditional PBX. This switchboard system, the “private branch exchange”, could be reused for a SIP system.

At Planet Telecom, we can supply SIP trunks allowing your firm to benefit from a system of this type. A PBX system can stabilise reliability because it uses a traditional phone line. You can ask about the shortcomings of VoIP before moving to a full service and its benefits.