Business Landline Face-Off: Copper versus VoIP–Which Is More Stable?
Perhaps you’ve heard about the debate between copper wires and Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP). They both have their unique advantages, but years of performance prowess reveals a clear winner in this head-to-head.
In this article, we’ll look at how businesses use both copper and VoIP for voice broadcasting and explain why one is the superior option.
What Is a Voice Broadcasting Service?
Voice broadcasting software is a powerful asset for modern businesses as they carry out marketing campaigns, drive sales, and manage their customer service. This type of software can deliver phone calls, voice messages, and some even offer text messages. While these communications can simultaneously go out to a vast audience, they’re also personalized.
At its core, a voice broadcasting service is all about establishing connections with customers. The business is able to save time by sending personalized messages at scale. Rather than manually entering recipients’ phone numbers and repeating the message for each send, they can create the message once, choose the recipients from their contacts, send it immediately or schedule it for later, and then track the results, while the recipients enjoy quality messages that are easy to understand and respond to.
Common examples of voice broadcasting include:
- Customer surveys
- Appointment reminders
- Promotions
- Emergency alerts
Voice broadcasting consistently gets strong results because it has an advantage that other marketing methods don’t have: the audience is almost always available. Research shows that 79% of adults have their phones with them all day long. In fact, most people have their phones with them for 22 hours a day, meaning you have an incredible amount of access.
What’s the Best Tech for Voice Broadcasting?
Given the benefits of voice broadcasting, there’s not much debate over whether it can be beneficial for your business. The questions arise over the best tech to use. In this head-to-head battle, you have two main options: copper lines and VoIP. Let’s take a closer look at both.
A Quick Intro to Copper Lines
This tech, known as Primary Rate Interface (PRI), is a proven solution that has been around for decades. PRI uses copper wire connections when transmitting video, data, and files. These copper lines physically run from the location of the business, just as copper lines were likely connected to the home where you grew up. They may not be the flashiest technology (they’re known in the industry as “plain old telephone service,” or POTS) but they provide a host of benefits that are anything but plain.
A Quick Intro to VoIP
As the name suggests, Voice over Internet Protocol utilizes the internet rather than traditional copper wires. This means that you only need a computer and internet connection to send and receive calls, with no physical phone service required. Multimedia data can also be transmitted, making video conferencing and other communication methods possible.
Which Is Superior? Here’s Why Copper Takes the Gold.
here’s no doubt that many business functions are best carried out through internet connections. Anyone who doubts this can just stop using their CRM for a week and go back to manually handling all those functions and tracking. This doesn’t mean, however, that the internet is best for everything. You’ll actually find that copper wires are the top performer when it comes to voice broadcasting.
Here are some of the top reasons:
1. Not Limited by Internet Connection
As any business owner knows, internet connections aren’t the same around the country. In many areas, connections aren’t strong enough to support consistent voice broadcasting. Even if your office typically has a great connection, internet providers encounter issues on a regular basis and your ability to rely on the internet can be compromised.
Copper wires, on the other hand, are based on landline systems that don’t experience the ebbs and flows of internet connection. They provide reliable deliverability and clarity unlike VoIP lines. Calls placed over VoIP lines have an audio delay for most callers, and minor to major sound quality issues for 40-60% of calls. The audio delays and sound quality issues interfere with human/voicemail detection technology used to determine if a human or a machine answered a call when delivering a voice broadcast message. The results are awkward delays before a message starts causing many to hang up and think there was no one there, and partial to no message delivery on a voicemail system due to the message starting sooner than it should.
2. Unmatched Quality
Providing a good experience to customers involves more than just getting your message to them. The clarity and immediacy of the message matters. Since VoIP relies on data bandwidth, there are times when the message doesn’t sound clear or includes undesirable pauses.
Copper lines avoid these issues thanks to their low latency and lack of packet loss. Your customers will get your messages loud and clear, with no background noise or other distractions. This translates to better answering machine detection and full messages being left versus the partial messages that often occur with VoIP. Furthermore, carriers and devices flag a lot of VoIP traffic as SPAM, while calls made over copper lines escape that designation and project the real number being called from.
3. More Secure
Protecting data is essential for the safety of both your business and your customers. Data transmitted over the internet, such as VoIP communications, are at a much higher risk of being targeted by criminals than copper lines. News headlines frequently discuss businesses being targeted by online hackers, but how often do you hear about people physically tapping into copper wires? Due to the difficulty of such a task, criminals tend to focus on the online world.
Delivering Quality for Your Business and Your Customers
Your business’s reputation is largely shaped by consumer touchpoints, so it’s in your best interest to ensure that these experiences are high-quality and free of problems. By using copper versus VoIP, you’ll be better positioned to establish the strongest connections and leave the best impressions possible.
If you want to learn more about the benefits of using copper lines for your voice broadcasting, our experts are happy to answer your questions and discuss strategies for your business.