VoIP service is all the rage lately, with many consumers lured to VoIP providers by promises of lower phone bills while maintaining excellent sound quality. People can certainly save money with VoIP and get more features than you typically get from your phone company (without paying extra) but sometimes the quality of VoIP service can be an issue. The upside is that most of the time, VoIP calls sound just as good as your regular phone line, but it's good to know what factors might cause that sound quality to suffer.

Distance

Distance can definitely affect the signal strength of your telephone call as it's routed through the Internet. A similar example of this effect is when you have the radio on while taking a road trip and get too far from the radio station. Television would be yet another example, with distance affecting that type of signal as well. Your VoIP company can take measures to compensate for this effect but if the signal gets too weak, the person you're calling might not even be able to tell who you are or understand what you're saying, if the call goes through in the first place.

Network Delay and Network Traffic

The best way to conceptualize network delay is to use the example of your nightly newscast. You've probably seen newscasters reporting from some far off country and noticed that there's often times a delay of a few seconds between the anchor in the studio asking a question and the reporter hearing and responding to the question. Well the same type of delay can happen as your voice is sent out over the Internet. VoIP companies have technicians that keep an eye on this type of error and strive to minimize the amount of delay present during your calls. However, this is certainly one of the problems that can occur, especially if there is quite a bit of traffic on your network.

How to Avoid These Problems Before They Start

When choosing your VoIP company, it might be a good idea to talk to others that have used them in the past or speak with the company representatives to get a feel for how they compensate for these decreases in sound quality. With the major VoIP carriers, this will probably not even be an issue since they have long-since worked most of the bugs in their system. But when choosing a smaller company, you might want to be sure they have measures in place to prevent these problems.

Unfortunately, there's not a lot you can do as the consumer to combat these problems. But by using a quality VoIP telephone service, you'll know that they have the expertise on hand to ensure your phone call quality remains high.