FatPipe has announced that a major business process outsourcing provider has chosen its SD-WAN technology to improve the reliability of its global call centers.

The unnamed company was previously using VoIP over an MPLS network to handle its calls, but suffered from unreliability. There was a lot of little degradations in service, including jitter, local loop failures and even outages. It would take up to 30 minutes for the company to recover from downtime. Most of this downtime came from having to re-register IP phones.

Given that call center agents need to be able to actually make calls, this situation was unacceptable. The company estimates that it lost over 21,000 hours in productivity. With over 100 sites in over 20 countries, it needed a solution to connect all of its remote sites while keeping its existing infrastructure.

The company turned to FatPipe to solve the connectivity problems. FatPipe’s SD-WAN solution uses VPN tunneling between devices so that they can failover gracefully if a switch goes down instead of dropping calls and having to re-register phones. If the links between switches are down, the calls simply go into hold. As annoying as being put on hold can be, it’s still better than a call being dropped entirely.

The new system is much easier for the company’s technicians to administer, since it doesn’t require BGP and can work with its existing routers.

VoIP has the potential to offer a lot of cost savings to business customers as they can run data and voice communication over the same network. The Achilles’ heel for VoIP systems often turns out to be networks. A poorly-planned network can lead to dropped calls and other call problems that the company has experienced.

A software-based solution like FatPipe’s lets administrators define more direct routes for VoIP traffic, reducing a lot of the problems with latency and dropped calls.