Softphone is a piece of software that you run on your computer. This software performs the functions of a phone set, with the added benefit of upgrading the interface and feature set as you please.

There are several types of softphones available, some free, some cost money and some are open source. Here is a linkto an article I wrote previously about softphones.

If you’ve tested softphones and found that the quality is sometimes not as good as a hard phone then you’re not alone. The simple reason being, hard phones are usually tested with your phone system and use the same codecsas the phone system while softphones are so easy to configure and by default may not have the matching configuration that works best with your PBX.

Some things to look for to improve voice quality are to make sure you use the proper codecs on your softphone, that you’re PC is connected to a switch that supports QoS and that you’re not running other CPU intensive applications that can disrupt the encoding process on the softphone. If you are implement traffic prioritization, then make sure your computer is plugged into a port that prioritizes for voice.

It needs to be mentioned, I run into people all the time who say they will not use VoIP at their business because of call quality issues. PEOPLE, you cannot compare any VoIP service over a circuit like a home DSL line provided on best effort basis.

When you make long distant and inter-continental calls, your call probably has VoIP somewhere in the path, you don’t know it and you think it’s great quality. If you want to compare call quality, make sure the VoIP circuit you are testing with is run on a circuit with a quality service-level-agreement and has plenty of bandwidth with that your compression algorithms require.

Remember, no matter what the Vonage ad says, if your broadband Internet connection has high packet loss, your voice quality is going to be crappy!