It Support: An Investment to The Heart Of Your Company
This week we had an appointment with a customer concerned about its VoIP system. In the last few days, it had been presenting an issue that was affecting the quality of service of incoming and outgoing calls and the productivity of the whole company.
To give some context about this issue, the client has a VoIP system with 12 extensions supported by a Cloud Service phone solution. The users started to experiment problems in the service for the following cases:
- Five users o more were connected simultaneously
- Three or more participants in a conference call
In both cases, their phone calls usually got disconnected.
To begin the troubleshooting of a broken VoIP service the first parameter to check is the bandwidth. An insufficient bandwidth is the main cause of a broken VoIP communication. We noticed that the phone service was consuming a lot of bandwidth so, using the Sonicwall as main devices in the network, we gave 80% priority to the traffic in real time which gives priority to the phones. We changed the Quality of Services (QoS) in the settings and increased the voice priority to fix the problem.
Besides some minor technical issues that could arise in the implementation of a VoIP system the advantage once the system is stabilized and customized, is that it barely needs technical support. In this instance, the issue was related to a change in the bandwidth by the ISP – Internet Service Provider. Once the ISP performed the changes, we had to be set up the system from scratch because the customer did not have any credentials or a backup.
Technology is changing rapidly every day, for that reason you need to have a record of the IT set ups and modifications performed at your company. In this case was the change of the bandwidth but velocity, capacity, and levels of security are aspects that are improved frequently to meet the current demands of the industry and if you don’t have an established plan for those changes at some point the productivity of your business will be affected.
It could be concluded from this case that some customers who have outsourced the technology solutions of their business don’t have a plan for their VoIP Systems. It could be because they hired a random IT guy to set up a solution or just to put out a current fire. The most important recommendation is that any company, no matter how small, it needs a backup and management of its network devices to avoid interruption when changes are performed. Setting up a service is fast but an implementation always needs the up and downs to reach the optimized point.