The Hidden Causes of Poor Call Quality
It always happens at the worst possible moment. You’re mid-pitch with your biggest prospect. The clients are excited and ready to close the deal, until the line cuts. By the time you reconnect, the window of enthusiasm and the deal are gone. Dropped calls on business phones are more than frustrating. They cost businesses deals and damage reputations.
Most assume that it is normal for Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) systems to work this way, when in reality, it is not. Calls drop for several reasons, many of which have easy solutions. Explore hidden causes of dropped calls and how modern telecommunication systems eliminate them with reliable and smart infrastructures.
3 Reasons Why Calls Drop
The following are common reasons why you may be experiencing frequently dropped calls.
1. Your Router Isn’t Built for Business Calls
The type of router you use for your business communications matters. Consumer-grade routers aren’t designed to handle the heavy, simultaneous and real-time demands of business VoIP. They prioritize speed over voice quality and often lack quality-of-service (QoS) settings. Many standard router models can’t efficiently allocate bandwidth to voice traffic, leading to voice calls dropping because of data congestion.
Without traffic prioritization, your calls compete with data-heavy activities, such as streaming video meetings or cloud syncing. Applications that consume almost all available bandwidth cause jitter and high call latency. It makes voice conversations choppy or robotic. Voice data requires consistent, low-latency delivery to avoid packet loss, lower dropped connections and eliminate poor call quality.
While convenient, Wi-Fi dependency is a hidden threat to business communications. Connectivity requires a stable network. Switching to Ethernet connections is a better choice for reliability and stability.
Upgrading to advanced routers offers your business many advantages. Here is why replacing your consumer-grade router helps with your business phone problems:
- Boosted performance and capacity: Business-grade routers handle heavy traffic and numerous devices without lagging, while consumer router designs are for fewer, less demanding connections.
- Improved security and features: Advanced router models feature robust, hardware-based security, such as firewalls and VPNs, unlike the basic security in older models.
- Enhanced reliability and support: Built with high-quality components, advanced routers ensure consistent uptime, while consumer-grade equipment often experiences more downtime and shorter lifespans.
- Increased management and scalability: Business routers support complex network configurations, such as multiple virtual local area networks (VLANs), whereas consumer-grade routers are simpler and offer limited networking capabilities.
Modern business communication systems like Avaya automatically mitigate and adapt to latency, jitter and packet loss network challenges without requiring perfect network conditions.
2. Your Phone System Is Outdated
As communication technology advances, older systems can’t keep pace. Legacy PBX systems and analog setups are traditional and easy to use, but they’re not effective or reliable for modern VoIP demands. Old telephonic hardware isn’t equipped with features to buffer jitter or handle packet loss, as they’re incompatible with packet-switched IP network technology. Systems over five years old often lack proper codec support and echo cancellation, which contributes to audio issues, failed collaboration and listener frustration and fatigue.
Outdated communications technology increases risks to performance, reliability and user experience. Each layer of outdated technology contributes to communication failure.
These layers include:
- Aged components: Legacy infrastructure’s hardware and physical cables are prone to failure and corrosion.
- Outdated software or firmware: Older models experience connectivity issues, potentially leading to “not registered on the network” errors.
- Inefficient codecs: Poor call quality results in distorted audio or dropped calls during peak network usage periods.
- System overload: Legacy systems often struggle to process increased traffic or demand without degrading quality.
Avaya systems operate on modern IP networks, combining voice and data for improved efficiency and reliability. Specialized components, such as IP media processors (MedPro), IP server interfaces (IPSI) and control LAN (C-LAN) modules, support high-capacity VoIP communications.
3. Your Provider Doesn’t Offer Adequate Support
Most connectivity issues are caused by incorrect configuration settings rather than a lack of bandwidth or hardware limitations. It leaves you with recurring call quality issues that standard troubleshooting, such as “restarting your router,” won’t fix.
Misconfigured SIP settings, firewall rules and network routing cause silent failures. Silent failure occurs when your communication system fails without any error message or warning. Without proactive monitoring from your provider, it can easily go undetected until customers or clients complain, which only increases their frustration.
Silent failures can be identified by various symptoms, such as:
- One-way audio: You can hear the receiver, but they cannot hear you, or vice versa.
- No audio: Your call connects, but no audio is heard on either side.
- Phantom ringing: The line rings, but there is no answer, or it drops immediately after answering.
- Dropped calls: Calls end abruptly without error messages.
A lack of provider support has many downfalls. A “fire and forget” setup approach leaves your system vulnerable to many risks. Without proper initial optimization, it can lead to security threats and performance degradation over time. When you have business phone problems and need call-dropping solutions, support is often slow to respond.
Oversubscribed provider networks can sell more capacity than they can handle, leaving them unable to keep up with demand for support. This affects your business by increasing downtime while you wait for assistance and lowering the priority given to your business and its communication needs.
Partnering with qualified providers ensures proper configuration and continuous monitoring of your business communication system, maximizing uptime, security and performance.
The Financial Consequences of Dropped Business Calls
Dropped calls are more than an annoying mishap — they can be dealbreakers that cost your business financially. Here’s what’s at stake:
- One missed call per business day results in unsuccessful deals and lost annual revenue
- Dropped calls increase customer frustration, leading to higher churn rates and more negative reviews
- Connectivity issues stress employees, which lowers their productivity and morale
- IT teams spend more time troubleshooting call issues than on strategic planning, driving up operational costs
When you notice frequent dropped calls on business phones, reduced productivity and inefficient operations, it is time to upgrade your system.
Enterprise-Grade Reliability: Avaya’s Approach
Avaya focuses on innovation without disruption and knows customer experience is key. With their high standard of dependability, performance and security, Avaya helps businesses modernize their communications with cloud-based capabilities to keep them connected. This approach aims to simplify the process and maintain businesses’ operational and network stability.
What sets enterprise-grade systems apart from others is their innovative features:
- Built for real-world network conditions.
- Automatic intelligent codec adaptation to network quality.
- Multiple failover paths for undisrupted connectivity.
- Advanced jitter buffers to improve call quality.
- Local processing to maintain call quality during connectivity disruptions.
Avaya is the ideal solution, specifically for its standard HD voice quality, VoIP-focused professional-grade hardware, automatic network optimization and dedicated support team. Businesses trust Avaya because they deliver reliability.
When upgrading to an Avaya communications system, you can expect:
- Crystal-clear audio, even on congested networks.
- Zero downtime during operations.
- Fast provider support when problems surface.
Designed to handle diverse network conditions, Avaya’s call-dropping solutions ensure your phone system performs exactly as intended.
Building a Reliable Communication Infrastructure
Upgrading to enterprise-grade communication solutions transforms your operations — enabling you to close more deals rather than explain dropped calls.
For effective communication, your setup needs to include:
- A thorough network assessment.
- Wired connectivity for desk phones.
- Router configuration optimization for voice data.
- Adequate bandwidth allocation.
- Redundant internet connections for failover.
Your communication system is only as good as its environment and hardware. The experts at Advanced Communication Systems can help your business ensure that all elements work together seamlessly.
Improve Call Quality With Advanced Communication Systems
Don’t accept dropped calls. At Advanced Communication Systems, we offer clients robust telephone solutions and industry-leading support. With offices in Maryland, Washington, D.C., and Virginia, we serve businesses locally and nationwide. Our expert technicians are certified in all Avaya products, both on-premises and in the cloud. We’ll audit your communication setup and pinpoint why calls drop.
Ready to see how Avaya systems eliminate dropped calls forever? Contact us today to get started.
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