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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!
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.
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
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