A key part of what sets us apart from our competitors is our commitment to providing excellent customer service — we don’t just offer great products and services but award-winning support for those services. While we have teams of dedicated specialists to support our customers through any issue or concern, we also recognize that sometimes customers want to troubleshoot on their own. One of our self-service resources is our latency tracker.

In order to understand our latency tracker, it’s helpful to know how VoIP calling works. While we have a blog post that explains VoIP technology, here’s a quick rundown.

When using an IP-enabled phone, voices are converted into audio packets that are sent across a network to the recipient. Usually, these packets arrive safely and on time with no issues, but when they don’t, callers may experience latency, packet loss, or jitter.

Latency happens when there is a delay in delivering the audio packets. While latency doesn’t affect audio quality, it does affect the conversation because voices may overlap or become hard to follow because of the delay.

Packet loss occurs when there’s traffic on the network. Because of the increased traffic, packets can be “dropped,” resulting in extra noise on the call or delays in receiving audio. Sometimes, there is so much traffic that the call is dropped from the network entirely, resulting in a dropped call.

Jitter happens when the audio packets arrive out of order, causing the conversation to become jumbled or choppy.

When customers are concerned about their network or circuit performance or are preparing to install VoIP technology, we send them a link to a network quality assessment. Once completed, the assessment provides Broadvoice specialists with information on how the network and circuit are performing. If it’s not performing optimally, we inform customers so they can work with their internet provider to address the issue, whether it’s to remedy latency, jitter, or packet loss. Our latency tracker is a software program that tracks the latency and allows customers to simulate different call types and durations over various periods to see if/where they have latency issues.

Broadvoice Provides Customers the Tools They Need to be Successful

Customer service and support will always be our top priority here at Broadvoice. We want to ensure our customers and partners are connected to the help they need to be successful.

For more information about latency and other VoIP issues, check out our blog post, or to learn more about our VoIP service, schedule a demo with one of our team members.