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The agile business that embraces tech will be powered by the internet and secured by redundancy. A business needs to have the flexibility of easily-programmed phones and robust call choices without being bound by copper wires, but traditional landline options must be there as an option. A well-configured network can reduce costs and leave room for affordable legacy networks, but the network requirements are specific for every business. Here are a few details explaining why network resource management matters, and how telephone professionals can help:

The Battle Of Bandwidth

One of the biggest challenges for small businesses and growing enterprises is budgeting internet capacity. Internet capacity--known as bandwidth in the technical world--can be thought of as a "pipe" of network resources that your different network tasks all share.

For communications, network resources mean both your company's internal network bandwidth and the internet bandwidth. Your network needs to be robust enough to handle the internet service plan and different network tasks. Your internet service plan needs to be robust enough to handle different internet-related tasks. These are similar requirements, but not the same.

When a computer downloads or otherwise uses the network, it's taking away from the resource pool. The problem occurs when network use depletes the resources, but it's not just an issue of not having enough resources. Network data can be erratic, and the simple act of using resources can cause the source and distribution points to haphazardly distribute information with errors without the right programming.

Network devices are getting better out of the box with fewer errors to allow simple connection and use, but some challenges still exist. Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP) is a somewhat sensitive example.

Why Is VOIP Considered Sensitive?

When you visit a website, open an image, or load most videos, you're getting a set of static data that just needs to be sent from web site servers to your computer. When small errors happen in transmission, it won't mess up the website. It will simply load slowly as the missing information is sent again, or your computer will show an obvious failure page when there are too many errors.

VOIP, along with live streaming video and audio, cannot simply send the data again. When you talk into a VOIP device, your voice information is converted into a digital format. Everything about your voice, from the pitch to the tone and other properties that haven't even been identified are recorded into a microphone and sent across the network.

If an error happens and this voice-to-data package is corrupted slightly, you'll lose a few bits of data. What do those bits represent? It's hard to know exactly what parts of a file that represent sound will be lost, but the end result is a "robotic" or choppy voice.

That information can't be sent again. You can talk again, but the original sound you made the first time is lost forever. VOIP needs a connection that is as free from error situations as possible, meaning that it needs higher priority over other data requests to be useful.

If you're using VOIP on an existing network, you'll need a professional to configure your routers and other network devices to share bandwidth so that VOIP has priority, but doesn't ruin the speed of other network tasks at the same time. Some businesses handle this by putting VOIP on its own, physically different internet connection, while other businesses rely on careful network manipulation.

Contact a company like competitive network management LLC for more information and assistance.