Six Reasons To Avoid VoIP

VoIP gets all the headlines, but it’s not for every enterprise. If voice quality is mission-critical, for instance, there is a business reason for retaining traditional phone service.

Despite all the marketing hype from Voice-over-Internet-Protocol providers and the trend away from traditional phone services to the IP-based technology, VoIP isn’t necessarily the right choice for all companies.

"It’s much better than the original IP of five or 10 years ago, but VoIP is still a new technology, so it still has some problems; though they’re getting to be fewer," says independent, Atlanta-based telecommunications analyst Jeff Kagan. "In 10 years all [telecommunications] will be VoIP, but right now most of the installations are a combination of VoIP and traditional phone service. I don’t know that you’ll ever get to a point where you want to drop a traditional phone service."

Though this could change in the next few years, traditional phone systems are still the right choice for certain companies or for certain situations, according to Kagan. He says that companies in the following six situations should still choose traditional phone service over VoIP or at least in combination with VoIP:

By Phil Britt
Networking Pipeline

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