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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.
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.
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 |
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/ ---
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.