CONNECTIVITY
Does the UK Have What It Takes?
Kim Holder, director – enterprise unified communications, Colt Technology Services discusses how UK providers can deliver consistent quality for voice, video and AI-enabled customer contact everywhere
Every few years the way we work shifts, and the strain shows up first in real- time media. Cloud calling is replacing PBXs, video has become the default meeting format, and collaboration and contact centres are now adding real- time transcription, meeting summaries, diagnostics and agent assist. These features are no longer optional, they are part of daily business. The question for UK providers is whether the network can deliver consistent quality for Teams, Webex, Zoom, Genesys Cloud, NICE and others, not only in London but also across regional sites and home offices. The UK today There is plenty to respect in the UK’s position. Gigabit access has expanded quickly, London remains one of the most interconnected hubs in the world, and the data centre and cloud ecosystem is deep. Many enterprises already run large estates on Teams or Webex, and cloud contact centres are ubiquitous. Where users still feel pain is consistency of experience.
they say “the call sounded poor” or “my meeting froze”. That variability is the gap to close if the UK is to offer the same experience everywhere that it already delivers in the capital. What good looks like For collaboration and contact, raw bandwidth is rarely the constraint. The real issues are path, peering and predictability. ✅ Path. Media should take the shortest, cleanest route to the vendor’s nearest media edge. If traffic hairpins through the wrong region, you pay in delay, echo and talk-over. ✅ Peering. Direct, well-engineered interconnects between your carrier and the platforms you use are critical. Poor peering shows up as random drops that no amount of extra bandwidth fixes. ✅ Predictability. Low latency, jitter and loss matter more
Kim Holder Director –
Enterprise Unified Communications
colt.net
The question for UK providers is whether the network
than raw speed. It’s essential to
can deliver consistent quality for
Outside the biggest metros, options for resilient, enterprise- grade fibre and diverse paths can be limited or costly. At busy times, latency and jitter vary. Users do not file tickets that say, “jitter increased by 12 ms”,
keeping calls stable, video
Teams, Webex, Zoom, Genesys Cloud, NICE and others...
smooth, and transcription clean. A solid design is straightforward. Use
SBCs to control media and apply policy. Deploy SIP from the cloud with
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