Why Cisco phone systems sound better (and what your network has to do with it)

What makes a Cisco phone system sound better?

The first reason is wideband HD audio. A traditional phone call carries a narrow slice of the human voice, which is why it sounds thin and why "S" and "F" blur together. Cisco phones use HD audio codecs that capture a much wider range of sound (a codec is the method the phone uses to turn your voice into data and back). When both ends of the call support it, voices sound like voices. That covers every call inside the office and many outside calls on lines that carry HD audio. Callers stop spelling their email address twice.

Cisco phones also deal with the room around you: the printer, the door, the waiting room, the three other conversations going on. The phones and headsets filter that background noise so the caller hears you and not the office. Built-in echo cancellation stops the loop that happens when the speaker's sound bounces back into the microphone. That loop is what makes cheap speakerphones so painful.

And the hardware is built for the job. The handsets, speakers and microphones in the Cisco 8800 series were designed for people who live on the phone: receptionists, dispatchers, schedulers, billing staff. The 8832 conference phone was built for a whole table, so nobody has to lean toward a laptop. This is the same gear that large hospitals, banks and government agencies run, sized for a ten-person office.

The Cisco phones we supply through VoIP PBX Express, our voice arm are refurbished to like-new condition, tested, and covered by a full warranty. If a phone fails while your plan is active, we replace it.

Why VoIP call quality is a network outcome

On a VoIP call, your voice is chopped into small packets of data, sent across your office network and your internet connection, and put back together at the other end, many times a second.

Packets that arrive late make the call sound delayed, so people talk over each other. Packets that arrive unevenly (the technical word is jitter) make words stutter. And when some never arrive at all, you get the robotic, underwater sound everyone recognizes, until eventually the call drops.

None of that is the phone's fault. The best handset in the world can only reproduce what the network delivers. So when a business tells us "our VoIP sounds terrible," we go straight to the switch in the closet, the Wi-Fi, the firewall and the internet circuit, because that is almost always where the fix is.

A vendor who only sells phones can get you halfway. The other half is the network the calls ride on, and the phone brochure never mentions it.

What does a phone-ready network look like?

A phone-ready network has a handful of pieces. You don't need to understand every setting, only that each piece exists and somebody owns it.

A PoE switch. PoE stands for Power over Ethernet. The switch sends data and power down the same network cable, so each phone plugs into one cable and needs no power brick on the desk. Fewer cords, and when the switch is on battery backup, so are the phones.

A separate voice VLAN. A VLAN is a lane on your network with its own walls. The phones get their own lane, so the copier, the security cameras, a big backup job and the break-room video stream stay out of it. The switch can also tell voice traffic apart, which is what lets it put voice first (that is the QoS rule, next). And the phones can't be reached from the guest Wi-Fi, which is a security win as well as a quality win.

Quality of service (QoS). QoS is the rule that says voice goes first. When the network is busy, the switch and the firewall move voice packets to the front of the line and let the email attachment wait a few milliseconds. Nobody notices the email, and everybody notices a choppy call.

Business Wi-Fi that can carry a call. Softphones on laptops and cell phones, and wireless handsets on the warehouse floor, all ride Wi-Fi. A consumer router or a single access point (the box on the ceiling that broadcasts the Wi-Fi) can't cover a whole building, so the signal fades as you walk between rooms and the call drops mid-sentence. Keeping a call alive on the move takes several access points that hand it off cleanly between them. We use Ubiquiti UniFi access points, placed and tuned for the building, with the same voice-first rules applied over the air.

A firewall in front of the phone system. Your phone system should never sit on the open internet. A proper business firewall lets your phone lines and your remote softphones in through one locked door and keeps everyone else out. We also switch on the encryption built into Cisco phones, which scrambles both the call setup and the audio between your phones and the phone system, so nobody in between can listen in.

A clean internet circuit, with a plan for when it is not. Voice needs a steady connection more than a fast one. We test the circuit before the phones go in, and where the phones matter enough, we set up a second internet path so the phones switch to the backup circuit within moments when the first one blinks. A call in progress at that instant may drop; the next one goes through.

Does reliability count as call quality?

It does, because a dropped call is the worst-sounding call there is. Cisco phones connect to the phone system and stay connected, and the system itself can be built for failover. When we design it that way, a backup takes over with little or no interruption if a connection or a component fails, so one failure doesn't take the front desk down with it.

We offer Cisco both ways, hosted in the cloud or on-premise, and we'll tell you plainly which one fits your office. Either way you keep the desk phones your front desk depends on, plus softphones for the people who roam.

Who notices a bad internet circuit before your staff do?

Andrew Igloo, our AI IT Network Administrator, does. Almost nobody offers that with a phone system. Every phone, switch, access point and firewall we install reports back to The Igloo, our operations center in Tenino, around the clock. Andrew watches the phones there as network devices. He sees a phone drop off the switch, an access point running hot, packet loss creeping up on the internet circuit, or a voice VLAN suddenly carrying traffic it shouldn't.

The trick is that he correlates all of it at once. A phone problem that is really a switch problem that is really a circuit problem shows up as one finding, in plain English, with the fix attached. When it matters, he pages a human. More often than not, you find out the circuit was degrading on Tuesday night from our note, and no customer ever has to ask why you sound like a robot.

What this means in SW Washington

Most of the "phone problems" we hear about across the region turn out to be network problems. A dental office in Lacey puts new Cisco phones on a fifteen-year-old switch with no PoE and no VLANs, and the front desk blames the phones for a year. A distributor in Centralia runs wireless handsets on the same Wi-Fi as the barcode scanners and the guest network, and calls drop every time a forklift crosses the floor.

In both cases the phones are fine. That is why our free on-site assessment starts in the switch closet, then the Wi-Fi, then the circuit, whether you are in downtown Olympia near the Capitol Campus or on Front Street in Port Angeles.

Bring your current phone and internet bills to that visit as well. Our Beat-Your-Bill guarantee is simple: send us your current bills and we'll beat them, proven in a free assessment. Clear calls are one part of the real business value of a VoIP phone system. If you'd rather talk it through first, call (360) 515-2500 any time; our AI answers 24/7.