What is VoIP?

The practical effect is that a phone line stopped being a physical thing. Numbers, extensions and simultaneous call capacity became settings rather than installations.

That is why a small business can now have a main number, a separate number for a campaign, and call recording, without an engineer visiting.

The tradeoff is dependence. Your calls now rely on your internet connection in a way a copper line never did.

Say your office of eight could have six people on the phone at the busiest moment of the day. With the standard uncompressed codec, G.711, each call needs roughly 85 to 90 kilobits per second in each direction once the packet overhead is counted. Six calls come to a little over half a megabit up and the same down.

Download speed is almost never the issue. Upload is, because many business internet plans are lopsided. A line sold as "300 meg" may upload at 10 or 20. Half a megabit still fits easily. The trouble starts when someone's laptop begins a cloud backup at 2 pm and fills the upload pipe, and every call in the office turns choppy at once. Voice packets that arrive late are as useless as ones that never arrive, which is why a call can sound terrible on a connection that passes a speed test.

The first is your 911 address. Your old copper line was tied to a building, so emergency dispatchers knew where you were. A VoIP phone works anywhere it has internet, so US providers ask you to register a physical address for each line, and that's what dispatchers see. If you move offices or send a desk phone home with an employee, update it that day.

The second is what your router does with voice traffic. Most business routers have a quality-of-service setting that lets voice packets jump the line ahead of backups and video. It's usually off by default. Turning it on is the single cheapest fix for the 2 pm choppy-call problem, and your VoIP provider's support page almost always has instructions for common router models. While you're in there, ask the provider where calls go if your internet drops, and set that number now.

GreetKeeper works with a VoIP line the same way it works with a mobile or a landline: you forward the number and nothing else changes.

On VoIP the forwarding setting lives in your provider's dashboard rather than behind a star code, which usually gives you more control over schedules.

Check your channel count before worrying about concurrency. The line is normally the binding constraint, not the assistant.