Long story short, my business bought a commercial building and we’re moving our company there. It’s out of town, fibre optic isn’t available, and the previous owners said VoIP is horrible through the available internet.
My question is, what are my options? I’m in Canada, is there a service provider over 4G/LTE where there’s a hub for SIM, and I can still keep my extensions? Or do I have to switch back to traditional landline?
I have run VoIP over 4G many times. The most important thing is making sure its stable, and does not have anything stepping on the available bandwidth. Generally if we are forced into 4G for a location, the voip network gets its own 4G connection separately.
What about point to point internet? Is that an option?
Using the 4g/lte you have two options.
Use a cloud service or host it yourself and get apps on your phone and use lte from your phones. Usually it will run fine. But make sure you host it in the cloud.
Or get a 4g/lte router and do it that way. But you would have to watch out if your using an on premise system as some of them require port forwarding and you usually can’t do that on a 4g/lte internet due to being shared. You’d still have to look at using a hosted service.
I primarly use 4g/lte for backup for VoIP but then have some type of stable internet inside.
What about satellite internet?
Don’t take the previous owner’s word for it for sure, but I don’t fault you for looking at options if the internet available doesn’t work out either.
Can you test the connection ahead of time at the new location?
What is actually available as an internet connection? DSL, Cable modem, Telco provided T1??
How many lines/channels are you using? What are the internet options? You can always bring in pots and covert that to voip internal if really need be. I have also seen a service that you can have your pbx talk to using sip that in turn treats a cell phone over regular voice service as an extension.
What are your internet options. Did the previous owner try tuning to remove buffer bloat and QoS turned on for Voip?
You can use any connection in VoIP, if you have a very low bandwidth you can use either G729 or G723 in codecs, in same cases you could try to use Opus it’s not as widely available as it should be but it can solve your internet speed issues
Starlink? I’m not in Canada but works well for us with VoIP in the UK.
I would look at what internet options are available. I would recommend doing this before finalizing any paperwork. I’ve had too many businesses get everything ready and not take into account the lack of internet until later and most businesses rely heavily on reliable internet these days.
Check for better internet. There is always Starlink and VoIP does work over it.
If it’s that bad , go star-link or Hughes satellite. Rural is going to cost more for reliable service. I’ve done setups on wireless and had good successes.