02. VoIP Services

Noojee offer business grade Voice over IP (VoIP) service to our business customers.

In order to obtain a VoIP service which provides consistent call quality Noojee mandates that the service be installed as follows:

• 10 Mbps data connection from Noojee.
• Cisco 1921 router (supplied with the 10 Mbps data service).
• Quality of Service (QOS) enabled on the router.
• The customer has a qualified IT support person or provider that will take responsibility for connecting the router to their internal systems.

Depending on the size of your organisation and number of simultaneous calls you make you may be able to use the 10 Mbps data service as both your Internet connection and you VoIP service. However; Noojee strongly recommends that you use a dedicated service for all of you VoIP calls.

Note: if you use your 10 Mbps data link for activities other than making VoIP calls then Noojee cannot guarantee the call quality.

Firewalls

If your organisation operates a firewall then the firewall will need to be re-configured to support the new Cisco 1921 router.

Your IT support team can obtain details on what changes need to be made to the firewall from here.

Please make certain that your IT support team are certified to maintain your firewall (this is for your own protection as well as ours). One of the biggest problems that Noojee faces when installing a new VoIP services is that the firewall is often not configured correctly. Firewalls are complex and many IT people in the industry have not been adequately trained in the operation of their firewall.

Typical symptoms caused by a mis-configured firewall are:

• Can't make an outbound call
• Can't make an inbound call
• One way voice
• Calls drop out after 'n' minutes on the phone.

Bandwidth Requirements

Each call over a VoIP connection will consume 100 Kbps. In English the means that with a 10 Mbps data link (as above) you can make 100 simultaneous calls.

In reality, the actual number will be less than this due to over heads. 80 simultaneous calls is a more reasonable estimate.

This of course assumes that you are not using the link for any other purposes (e.g. web surfing, email, downloads etc.).

You can increase the number of calls you can make over the 10 Mbps data link by using compressions. Noojee uses G.729 for compression. When using G.729 compression each call will only take 50 Kbps meaning that you can in theory make 200 simultaneous calls over a 10 Mbps data link. Noojee's services support G.729 'out of the box' provided that you phone system and handsets support G.729. Call our sales team to check if you phones support G.729.

Call Quality

Noojee employs premium services in order to deliver consistent call quality, however if you don't configure your firewall or mis-use you 10 Mbps data link then call quality will suffer and calls can be dropped.

The key cause of call quality is when organisations saturate their Internet connection. This is surprisingly easy to do. All it takes is for one staff member to start downloading a very large file or to send or receive a very large email or for lots of staff to start surfing the web at the same time (like at lunch time).  If you are having call quality issues due to link saturation then you may need to look at installing a separate Internet connection for data (general surfing and email).

Bandwidth contention

If you are not utilising a dedicated 10 Mbps data link from Noojee then you can suffer from bandwidth contention.

So what is bandwidth contention? Many ISP over-sell their services, this is the norm for residential grade services and for many low end business grade services. Whilst you may have a ADSL2+ connection with speeds up to 21 Mbps, what in fact actually happens is that you are sharing that same 21 Mbps with all of your neighbours (I'm using the term neighbour fairly loosely here but the concept is correct). What this means is, if they are all off on holidays, you can get a full 21 Mbps, but when the kids come home from school, or its lunch time in the office next door, your top speed can drop dramatically.

An 'uncontended' link ensures that you always have 21Mbps regardless of what your neighbours are doing. If you provider won't tell you what your links 'contention-ratio' is or they use terms like 'burstable' then its time to find a new provider.

Why would I want a 10 Mbps connection from Noojee when I can get a 21 Mbps ADSL connection?

Good questions, I'm glad you asked :)

The difference is the 'upload' speed. With a 10 Mbps data link from Noojee the service is 10 Mbps in both directions. With a 21 Mbps ADSL connection the 'download' speed is up to 21 Mbps but the upload speed is typically around 0.6Mbps.

If you are surfing the web then you really don't care about the upload speed, the download speed is important. When making a phone call you care equally about the upload and download speeds.

To illustrate:

As you can see from the above table, Noojee's 10 Mbps data connection can handle 100 simultaneous calls vs the 6 calls for an ADSL 2 connection.

You should also note that if you try to send a large email (as an example) with an ADSL 2 connection it will significantly reduce the number of calls you can make and impact call qualiyt, whilst with an 10 Mbps connection it will have a relatively smaller impact.