7 mistakes your business could make when choosing a VoIP system
Don't let the wrong phone system cost you
by https://www.techradar.com/uk/author/ritoban-mukherjee · TechRadarHow Tos By Ritoban Mukherjee published 8 May 2026
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Switching your business to VoIP looks straightforward on the surface: pick a plan, get the phones, start saving on calls. But for business leaders actually responsible for keeping communications running, the gap between what a provider promises and what you get in practice can be significant.
The mistakes below come up regularly in deployments across businesses of all sizes, from five-person offices to distributed teams of hundreds. Most of them aren't obvious before the system goes live, which is exactly why they're worth thinking through before you sign anything.
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1. Not auditing your network before switching
VoIP runs entirely over your internet connection, so your network quality determines your call quality. Each concurrent call uses roughly 100 kbps of bandwidth in each direction, which sounds modest until you factor in video conferencing, cloud backups, and other everyday traffic all competing for the same pipe.
Beyond raw bandwidth, latency and packet loss matter just as much. Packet loss above 1% produces audible audio problems; latency above 150ms creates a perceptible delay that frustrates callers. Before evaluating any provider, test your connection with a VoIP-specific diagnostic tool and confirm your router is configured with Quality of Service (QoS) settings that prioritize voice traffic.
Most modern office broadband connections can handle VoIP with the right setup. The bottleneck usually isn't bandwidth — it's that no one checked first.
2. Choosing a provider based on price alone
Price is the obvious first filter when comparing VoIP systems, so there's nothing wrong with starting there. But you shouldn’t stop there. Many large providers compete aggressively on headline pricing but offer limited support once you're under contract, routing post-deployment issues through automated chat rather than someone who actually knows your configuration.
Look beyond the monthly per-seat cost. Check what the contract says about support response times, whether technical assistance is available around the clock, and what the provider charges separately for call recording or international calling that others include by default.
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