Your phone calls travel between the handset on your desk to the Cloud PBX as a stream of data like when you stream content from a Music Streaming Service or a movie. The difference is that a voice phone call is a two-way stream.

The content, (movie, song, or phone call) is encoded into many, many, tiny packets of data sent sequentially from the sending source to the recipient.

The receiving device, whether it’s your computer, your smartphone, or your desk phone, receives these packets and as it receives, it checks to make sure they are all there as they should be.

To make it simple to visualize, think of the stream of data as tiny envelopes, numbered from 1 to 10 being sent in sequence through a tube.

We want those tiny envelopes to arrive without interruption in exactly the sequence that they were sent in, so that Envelope#1 is to arrive first, followed by Envelope#2, and so on...

Imagine we are trying to transmit the phrase, "Hello, how are you today?"

Below is an illustration (Diagram 1) of that perfect stream, each numbered Envelope arrives in sequence immediately after the previous one.

When the Transmitting Device or the Receiving Device drop or lose data packets (Diagram 2), this result is broken or choppy voice (something that we have all experienced at one time or another on our mobile phones). The callers only hear pieces of the audio.

If delays occur between sender and receiver the effect is sometimes experienced as severe echo (Diagram 3) enough to make portions of the conversation unintelligible.

So, we need to have an Internet Connection that permits these packets to travel without restrictions so that they arrive without: