You want to get the best voice-over-Internet-Protocol (VoIP) service provider for your team. That way, they’ll be able to communicate with clients and close deals. They’ll have access to the business information they need, and you’ll have a practical, efficient workforce.
When you begin your search for reliable VoIP service companies like Vonage, you’ll be analyzing the usual features. It’s just the same as when you’re choosing a good team messaging app like alternatives to slack. You’re likely to check the reliability of VoIP companies, the bandwidth available, and the speed of service they offer you.
Cost is an important consideration. A detail that is more important to your day to day operations, though, is the number of data centers that VoIP vendors use. Be sure to study the amount of data centers on offer and their location too. In this article, we’ll explain why.
The Reliability of Your VoIP Service is Increased
Source: Global Market Insights
VoIP service is one of the must-have office productivity tools, and its reliability is increased significantly with the use of multiple data centers. Primarily, vendors use multiple data centers to ensure reliable service. When one data center malfunctions, loses connection, there will be at least one other data center available.
This additional capacity ensures that your manpower can continue their team collaboration for sales through calls on the cloud. Business continuity is essential for your organization. But it’s also imperative for your VoIP service provider.
With multiple data centers, they’ll be able to avoid interruptions to your service. They can communicate any outages through remote assistance and provide a solution while they address their repairs, while you enjoy uninterrupted service.
Vonage - Reliable VoIP Solutions
- Voice, Video & Text Collaboration
- Free Consultation
- Plans For Large & Small Businesses
- Conferencing Tools
- CRM Integration - Including Salesforce
- 99.999% Uptime
The operational costs of a VoIP system not functioning will vary by business. At a minimum, you have to cover staff costs while employees are unable to work. However, for some small businesses, this downtime can cost upwards of $10,000 an hour.
It’s not only technical problems that can cause a data center to cease operations. One of the reasons your VoIP service provider could lose connection is a natural disaster. In many places, earthquakes are a common occurrence. And no matter how slight they are, quakes can severely damage data centers.
You must choose a service provider that has data centers in geographically dispersed locations. If one data center becomes damaged, your service won’t be impacted.
Source: Techdocs
If a natural disaster strikes, it’s likely to damage data centers in a region. Multiple data centers in different locations add to the reliability of your vendor.
You’ll Get Faster Speeds
Another benefit of VoIP vendors with multiple data centers in different locations is the quality of service they provide. And by that, we mean the speed of service they’re able to offer to your team and consumers operating from multiple static IP addresses.
We’ve already mentioned that data centers clustered together is a bad thing for reliability. It’s bad for your connectivity too.
Source: Equinix
If your business uses VoIP from a service provider with data centers on the other side of the country, it might not make a huge difference. Smaller European countries, for instance, aren’t likely to see a noticeable difference.
But Florida to Washington? Or New York to California? What about data traveling the width of Canada or from one region of the globe to the other?
Data that travels vast distances will take more time to reach its destination. This is especially true when all of the data centers are in the same place. Connections will be slower and will cause audio delays on VoIP calls.
Using a service that has several data centers located around the globe will provide a more consistent service. The closer the data centers your service provider has to you and your customers, the better the quality and reliability of the call. Furthermore, technologies such as Edge Computing will only improve upon this to create ultra-fast service speeds.
You’ll Avoid Network Overload
Each call that you make over a VoIP phone generates packets of data. As the volume of calls increases, the amount of information a data center needs to handle sees a corresponding rise.
Any VoIP service provider could be managing calls for thousands of companies. That means there could be millions of data packets being compressed, distributed, and received all over the world through file sharing programs.
These VoIP service providers need to ensure they have a configuration to handle those demands. There is a limitation to how much information a data center can handle. If a company attempts to streamline everything through one data center, performance will suffer.
You can picture this as a funnel. If too much data is sent to a center, jitter, delays, and other inaccuracies will creep into conversations. More concerningly, there could be a catastrophic network overload.
As an example, let’s imagine a VoIP service provider in the United States. They have thousands of US-based customers, and the majority of those customers are working 9 am – 5 pm shifts. That means that for one-third of the day, demand will be higher than the rest of the time. If the need for data processing capacity exceeds supply, you are going to have problems.
VoIP service providers can avoid this issue by having multiple data centers. That way, congestion is avoided. A service provider can route calls between data centers, and the workload is managed more effectively.
Vonage - Reliable VoIP Solutions
- Voice, Video & Text Collaboration
- Free Consultation
- Plans For Large & Small Businesses
- Conferencing Tools
- CRM Integration - Including Salesforce
- 99.999% Uptime
Multiple Data Centers Keep Your Team Productive
This article seeks to highlight some of the issues you need to be aware of when selecting a service provider — selecting a company that has multiple data centers close to where you and your customers are based will improve the reliability of the service and the call quality.
By now, you’re sure to be examining every VoIP service provider’s data center information with a magnifying glass. Send your team messages through platforms like Mitel about the changes they notice to make a conclusive decision. It’s quite the work but you’ll be glad when you get a VoIP vendor with a data center arrangement that promises reliability.