If you are thinking of deploying a Hosted VoIP or Hosted PBX system for your business, performing the following steps will help determine if your Internet service is adequate.

1. Ask your VoIP service provider whether they have experience with customers in your area using your ISP. Good service providers will be able to tell whether their customers are getting good results with certain ISPs.

2. Do not take your ISPs word for the speed they are delivering. In most cases, it will be less. Connect a PC as close as possible to your ISPs modem or router and go to http://myspeed.visualware.com/index.html to run a speed test. Write down your upload speed and your download speed. The lowest speed is the most important which usually is your upload speed.

3. Determine your desired number of concurrent voice calls. Take 75% of your lowest speed (upload or download) and divide by 35Kbps (typical size of a voice call using G.729 codec which most VoIP service providers use). If the result is greater than the number of concurrent calls then your speed is sufficient. Don’t forget that if your speed is measured in Mbps that 1 Mbps = 1,000 Kbps (0.1 Mbps = 100 kbps).

4. Open two DOS command windows by Start – Run – cmd. In one window type “ping www.google.com -t” and in the other “ping www.bing.com –t”. Let these run for 2 or 3 business days. Typing ctrl^c will display the results. Determine your packet loss by dividing the Lost packets by the Sent packets. You want the packet loss to be less than 0.1%. If so, then you likely have a reliable Internet circuit. You can check on their progress by typing ctrl^break, while the pings are running.

If you learn that you have a quality ISP, you have sufficient speed to support the number of concurrent calls that you need and you have a reliable circuit, then your Internet connection is ready for Hosted VoIP.

Although a quality connection to the Internet is required, it is not the only thing you should think about when deploying a Hosted VoIP or Hosted PBX system for your business.

The following links should be of further help: Will Your Internet Connection Destroy Your VoIP Service?

I hope this article has been helpful to you. Please let me know your thoughts in the comments section below.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 3rd, 2010 at 10:53 pm and is filed under Hosted PBX, Hosted VoIP, Internet, QoS. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.