Can small businesses rely on VoIP?
<<<... While dropped calls or garbled connections may be tolerated by some consumers, business users generally have higher expectations for quality and reliability. "The internet itself is not business class," said Lisa Pierce, a vice president at Forrester Research. "Performance of the network is largely unpredictable. It's like the freeway. Sometimes you can sail through with no traffic, and other times you can be stuck in a traffic jam for hours."
Different for enterprise VoIP
By contrast, big companies deploying VoIP technology from suppliers, such as Cisco and Avaya, don't use the public internet to transport their voice traffic. They use their own IP networks to transport calls within their campuses. And for calls travelling to other branch offices, they use leased data links rented from service providers such as Verizon or AT&T. As a result, large VoIP installations often require companies to invest millions of dollars to upgrade their local-area and wide-area network infrastructures. There's no question that these enterprise-class VoIP systems are too expensive for companies with fewer than 50 or 100 employees. But even the small-business offerings from Cisco and Avaya are often too pricey for many companies, especially those with fewer than 10 employees.