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Will VoIP Kill the PBX?
gManZboy writes "Following up on their last VoIP article, Queue just posted "Not Your Father's PBX?" from Jim Coffman at Avaya Labs. Looks like the PBX may survive, but it's going to have to evolve considerably. I guess eventually corporate telecom goes away as a kind of island in the MIS dept? Maybe that's already happened?"
We use 3Com's NBX system for our small business. The convenience of a PBX, with the convenience of running over Ethernet and/or IP and configuration via web browser. That meant no independant telephony guys, just building the system and configuring it.
There are VoIP gateways, but to be honest, we just have one location go out of PSTN and another over a T1, it wasn't worth going through the headaches, but for a larger company, it is. However, we can tie together over our VPN the two systems, so inter-office calls go over IP, not the phone system.
As the PBXes are being interfaced via computer, there is no need to have the telephony guys in their own world.
Alex
See Asterix, which works with three VoIP protocols.
Personally, I'm intrigued by software like Asterix and its capabilities, but I have absolutely no telephony knowledge and I'm not really sure where to start, like what kind of hardware I'd need in order to set this up with POTS. Lots of modems? Special cards for the phones in the office?
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
So far, VoIP has been a boon for the large companies who have the money to implement it between corporate sites. It seems to me as if it will take quite a while for network effect to kick in and have enough market share for it to be worthwhile as the sole delivery of voice services.
The other issue is that much of the IT staff don't comprehend the Telecom issues, like line hunting, rollover, etc.. Unless they have been explicitly trained on it. I think we'll still have a staff of Telecom folks who are instead trained up in additional IT concepts like routing, VLAN's, etc.
The infastructure is already there, the quality is the same and can be better, and the price is much cheaper, not to mention more services running over the same lines cuts costs and increases the convience of maintnence. However, relying to much on a system based completly on VOIP could cause outages without the proper redundancy. Also, phreakers would be sad, either that or they would just become hackers...
My parents were in the hurricane in Florida and lost power (of course). No electricity, no internet, no cordless phones and the cell phone towers were out as well.
The corded phone plugged into the wall outlet worked for hours after the power went out and was on days before the power was restored.
In the US the phone system is required to have its own separate power supply/source to ensure that communications continue.
I'm not a luddite, I'm all for VOIP, cordless phones, etc. But in this case, I also like redundancy!
I am an IT manager for a mid sized publishing company and we just replaced our phone system. We looked at both IP based and traditional PBXs. We went with the traditional PBX with an IP gateway. It did not make sense to abandon the investment in phone wiring and complicate our data network at the same time. Keeping the two separate but connected reduces points of failure and allowed us to leverage a very proven technology. The only parts of the install that were difficult were with the IP side of the system. The traditional PBX side went off with out a hitch. The vendors are experienced and the tools are proven. For a company with out a dedicated telcom department and a simple network plan the traditional phone systems made the most sense.
I certainly hope so, just to make things easier. I know the telecom guys need to make a living, but the idea of plunking down $50-90K for a Sprint or Nortel solution is just painful. Our local telecom people (read: the office managers that take care of the extensions and phone lists) can swap extensions to different jacks around the office and setup new voicemail. Anything more complication and it's a several hundred dollar service call. I'd welcome the days where that could go away, replaced with user-manageable software. That and the cheaper wiring costs alone are enough for me.
Nothing but the finest in meaningless drivel
Can people post howto's or give some explanation on how they use Asterix? There is little information on their web site other than a list of supported hardware. It looks like there is a 10$ modem (Intel winmodem?) that can be used with it??
:(
Is this the only thing you need in order to use Asterix or do you need to invest a lot of $$$ in hardware?
I'm also curious what kind of setup you need on the phone side? ISDN? Normal phone line? Can you do VOIP from 1 Asterix to another? (across continents) etc etc.
Very interesting product but little information
-- Leeeter than leet
We used Avaya, and the main advantage, is while it is VoIP, the backplane of the PBX is good 'ol TDM. SO our sites can have a mix of digital, VoIP, and analog phones. Also if you currently have an avaya PBX, you can doa quick swap, and keep your TDM phones but do site-to-site with H.323 IP Trunks, and add VoIP phones as you go. The management aspect of VoIP is often overlooked. While the new features, dial routing ability (route outside calls out the PRI of the closest office) are nice, there is alot of troubleshooting and M/A/C work that has to be done. Its more like managing network gear (switches, etc) then PCs/Servers. The system has meant more work, not less, because there is ZERO integration with our AD infrastructure. We have to add users and maintain users in like 4 different places now. Atleast Cisco's Call Manager is ActiveDirectory Integrated.
When was the last time an invention just outright killed its less advanced or less cool predecessor?
Remember the floppy drive? CD and Dvd and digital media were supposed to kill it, but it has been "dying" for years now. These things take time!
Yes, 50 years from now existing PBX will be but a fond memory to most of us. But it won't happen overnight. The same way a car's look evolves, so does the technology. This is both because people like familiar things, but also because companies like to eek out all potential profitability from every idea and product before moving on to the next thing.
It's just not profitable to "kill" a widely used technology like that.
If you wonder where the PBX is heading look at the simple office copying machine. They used to make copies. Now they make copies, colate, autoscale, create PDFs on the fly and then fax the results to someone while storing the PDF somewhere AND emailing a copy to a lit of people.
Which only underlines the point that copier manufacturers are jamming all sorts of needless functionality in there to try and maintain relevance. Yes, I said needless. Who actually uses the copier anymore? For that matter the FAX machine?
Software will always ALWAYS develop faster than hardware, for the simple differences in product rollout cycles and capital costs. For this reason alone, PBX and special telephony HW is doomed. Sure, PBX may have some life left, and sure it will evolve (just like those humongous kitchen-sink copiers), but eventually they will be relegated to the back burner, then dropped from IS/IT budgets.
PBX will die.
davejenkins.com |
I use the copy machine, FAX and good old US mail every day. I also administer our PBX. Yes it has a nifty interface over TCP/IP now, but it uses the same old Cat-3 wires and 66-punch-down blocks as always. And, [RANT] considering that our company's procurement policies are so restrictive that buying a new $300 FAX (single-purpose stand-alone) required a huge hassle from corporate purchasing; [/RANT] there is no way in heck that we are going to spend the $$$ to change our phone system.
For brand new companies, yes VoIP technology is great, it saves money and so on. But old dinosaurs that barely survived the mass-extinction of the Go-Go-90's aren't investing in anything right now.
As far as paper is concerned, we print more paper now than ever, and like it that way. We also have huge rooms full of paper documents and pallets of document boxes taken to long-term storage every month. At the end of the month, we generate stacks and stacks of reports to send to our clients to let them know that we are doing a good job, and we have to keep paper copies (as well as electronic) for 7-years.
We generally spend over $600 on postage every month, and that's at pre-sort rates mind you. Even though the majority of our business transactions go over EDI, sometimes sending a good old paper invoice, bill or statement helps collect the money.
Until digital signatures or some other form of really strong encyrption becomes commonplace, "hardcopy" documents won't be dissappearing any time soon from business operatinos.
The 3COM NBX came out of MIT, uses WindRiver VX an RTOS unix, and with the SS3 series, features true redundancy. I should know, I both use and implement 3COM VOIP products. I have yet to seen an NBX crash due to software bug and terminate calls, hell, the NBX could go down and all internall calls still go on becuase the call is point to point. Only the outside lines are affected. I have had my own NBX up for a year + now with ZERO downtime.
I live 185 miles from my NBX, when I travel, I take my firewall (router to router vpn with dynamic dns)and phone. Good to go where ever I am at. Try that with traditional PBX.
I got a new setup, bought some Cisco 7960 SIP phones off eBay, hired an Asterisk pro to do the initial setup since I was on a tight timeline. Use nufone for inbound 800 and outbound LD ($.02/minute both ways). And I love it! Our main office is in New Jersey, we're in SLC, UT. They're just extensions on the phone system. Voicemail works, caller ID works, calls sound the same as normal phones.
We do have 6 analog lines with 2 PCI digium cards, which I would NOT do again. The line charge is more than we would ever spend in 800/local calling. I'm evaluating SIP/IAX softphones now. I think I may be free of the curse of the Nortel PBX forever!!
Costs..? $400 built yerself Linux box with a P4/IDE hard drive. $230 per phone on eBay ($220 for phone (incl shipping) $10 for power supply) *these phones are NICE - Cisco 7960 $1200 for Asterisk pro's time (he should charge more! shhhh) total cost for 10 phone system that has more features and works better than any high end Nortel I've ever spend $50k on, $4k
I'm thinking of setting this up for my house, sinc e nufone has a pay as you go $.02/minute plan.
Oh, and I just found out Asterisk automatically creates report logs in .cvs format! w00t!
Every day I find something new in Asterisk that I love.
My Linux Command of the Day site : LCOD
On episode 60 of Binary Revolution Radio (about 1.5 months ago) we went into great detail on setting up an asterisk PBX from the ground up. You can listen to it (several times if necessary) and be able to set up your own PBX for next to nothing! We have done this and proven that it works and gives immeasurable control to users and huge savings for businesses. - http://www.binrev.com/radio/archive.html
--- The revolution will be digitized! - http://www.binrev.com/ ---
That said, I was (by no means) discounting the people who are out to make a living off of Asterisk support. I have a very good friend who would be more than happy to do this for cash.
My basic understanding is that Digium has released Asterisk into the market place to boost their core business, selling Telecommunications interface boards.
Kinetic stupidity has a new brand leader: Allen Zadr.
There are major differences between VOIP, IP Telephony, Internet Telephony, and packet carrier. These terms can't be used interchangably!
Avaya doesn't know IPT, not enough, not even their 8700, sorry but it's true. They will sell you whatever they can talk you into buying, DON'T BUY THEIR IP SYSTEMS!
Asterisk is an awesome system that has come a LONG way, I really look forward to when I can carve out a living with it. I just can't today the budgets are in Cisco because of it's scale, support, and maturity. (REAL IP phreaks can laugh along with me, but it's basically true.)
mod away, I feel much better.
I felt physically ill after reading down the entire forum at +3. I couldn't believe how many people were poisoned with bad information, and how many more didn't even understand the very simplest terms of the industry.
I shamelessly posted under your post (FP to my browsing) to ensure that somebody saw it before being modded into nothingness. It was not related to your post in any way.
I must say that you can deploy each of the technologies mentioned previously separate from each other. There are many valid business reasons to do so depending on a companies goals and direction.
A few years ago I was doing nearly all VOIP and VOFR work with a little VOATM on the side. People only wanted to use their data WAN for toll bypass, IPT wasn't ready yet and most of us were too busy getting ready for Y2k to work on it.
The last three years has been almost 100% IP telephony, and the painful task of integrating the IPT systems with almost every imaginable TDM switch you can imagine as well as a handful of IP switches (if a vein of pure hatred for Avaya exists in my body it is for very good reasons, sometimes it comes out a little.) Because the voice is native IP to begin with there is no gateway conversion from analog voice to packet and thus it isn't VOIP, but from another perspective it is... BTW regarding this, most of my life is spent configuring systems via web servlets, and once in a while making an ass of myself on /.
I have a client that is a regional carrier, although I do not work on the gear that does the packetized voice over their optical network, I have done some network design meetings regarding backhauling my voice over their sonnet backbone with those folks. Entirely different technologies that may be used together, but if you have an old TDM switch attached via copper lines to the carrier and you call long distance you are probably using packet voice, at least in your carriers backdone.
Internet Telephony is what many of the people are referring to. Vonage uses IPT technology to provide service to it's customers, and technically it uses VOIP. I want to die when people tell me know ip voice because they use packet8 at home. Both are great products, don't get me wrong, but you do not understand the power of the dark side! Er I meant, it's not really apples to apples to a enterprise class voice system.
I really like a few posts from hobbiest who have been using Asterisk, and a couple of the posts from people who obvisouly have some enterprise background, but 95% of what was posted yesterday was pure crap.
Again my apologies for abusing your FP.
Cheers!