Thanksgiving might be over but there's still Christmas and New Year's Eve coming. Valentine's Day is also not too far off. There will be a lot of voice traffic in the next few months. You have to be prepared for this. You need to stay accessible with good quality VoIP service; and there are things you can do on your end to ensure this.
The first thing to do is to use a VoIP monitoring service, such as VoIP Spear. It is actually best to not wait for periods when you expect voice call traffic. Setting up an account with VoIP Spear ensures that you're on top of your VoIP's performance. You will know right away if there are problems with your service. During high voice traffic season, such as Christmas and New Year's, this becomes crucial.
Sometimes, the problem lies in your setup, not in your VoIP service provider. Many hardware technicians say that the proximity of your VoIP equipment with each other can result in some audio problems, such as feedback. So, to easily curb this, set up your equipment as far apart as possible.
Another thing: do a maintenance check on your equipment, especially your cables. Ensure that everything is in tip-top shape.
It also pays to invest in good VoIP equipment. Quality - as well as price - varies. Read up on product reviews first before you go out and buy equipment.
Ultimately, your go-to tool for ensuring that your VoIP service is optimized on your end is your QoS or Quality of Service. You can access this through your router's control panel. You will need to tweak your default settings when you want to prioritize voice calls. This is necessary because, along with voice, you are also likely running file sharing and gaming applications - the other two biggest bandwidth users. The first step here is to determine your average upload and download speeds using an online speed test. Once you have these numbers, tweak your speed to just 70% to 80%. What you want to do here is trigger the use of your QoS priorities. If you do not set caps on your download and upload speeds, any bandwidth priorities that you specify will not take effect. Once you've done this, you're ready to set priorities. Of course, give VoIP voice and video applications top priority (Exempt). Lower the priorities of gaming and file sharing application to Bulk.
