The quality of your Internet connection is VERY important if you are going to use a VoIP Service for your office telephone system. There are many ways of defining an ADSL and many of them are confusing and rather technical. Most people are familiar with download speeds because that is how most ADSL broadband Internet services are measured, but the upload speed is important when using VoIP because conversations are two way… well, they should be.
The best place to test your Internet speed is a website called SpeedTest.net. You just need to go to this website and click Begin, it will then go through it’s processes and give you a result – pay close attention to the upload speed.
When you see the upload speed it will be in Megabits per second (Mbps) and anything less than 1 Megabit is measured in kilobits.
Voice conversations over VoIP involve sending voice through the Internet as voice data packets and if you look at the Voice Codecs information and marry that with your upload speed you’ll soon discover how many concurrent VoIP conversations you can have in your office.
This image shows 0.84 Mbps which is the same as 840 Kbps. Although many people think they want to run the highest quality codec they can, they discover that the voice quality is fine using the G.729 protocol (NERD ALERT!) and because it only uses 8Kbps you will be able to easily have say 5-10 concurrent conversations and still enjoy good quality audio.
This information is assuming that your Internet service is even and doesn’t fluctuate when the load at your ISP is heavy (like after school when all the kiddies are using it for YouTube videos). Remember that the quality of your Internet service is not just dependant on your local network but also how many other customers the ISP is servicing at any one moment. What you can affect in your own office is the QoS, or Quality of Service.