Finally, Decent QoS on Routers

In the early days of VoIP and Voipfone protecting the quality of telephone calls from other uses of the internet was a bit of a holy grail, bandwidth was low – particularly on the upload channel – and sending an email during a conversation could ruin a call. In those days we sold a special unit that attempted to limit the amount of bandwidth that any application could grab in order to protect the voice call. This box just about worked but was very expensive and couldn’t do anything about downloading files and browsing websites during a call so very few people used it.

What was needed was overall quality control of the entire service – that’s calls coming from, and controlled by, the network – and quality control on the uplink to our network which is controlled by your router.

We did what we could with our own network a few years ago by engineering our own broadband service to prioritise voice over all other uses of your service but until recently our ability to control calls from your router into our network was limited.

But now, finally, we’ve found a high-quality router that can also protect the upload stream, so from now on, all our free routers will include this feature.

This may all seem a bit esoteric but the combination of network and router control means that nothing now can interfere with your calls if you use Voipfone’s broadband service. For many people this also means that having to have two broadband connections and line rentals in order to protect their voice service is no longer necessary – a huge cost saving.

More information about our broadband can be found here