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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?"
You can't integrate your PBX with your application server. But have you got Tomcat servlets controlling your Asterisk server, and being "called" by it?
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make install -not war
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
not in the US anyhow. not with fbi wiretapping provisions staggering adoption.
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.
And what praytell will be responsible for your complex dialplans (routing) or giving access to client SIP phones? PBX's aren't going anywhere but *of course* they have to evolve, it is amazing they have remained sedantary for so long.
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. The PBX of next year will integrate even more so than the one's of today in a cheaper, faster way.
The PBX isn't going extinct but many of the specialized lockin systems and consultants may.
--- I do not moderate.
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.
When someone who *doesn't* work for a telecom manufacturer starts saying stuff like this, I might listen.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
Geez, and I've been doing both all these years. Don't I feel screwed...
blah, blah, blah
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...
From my experience over the past several years it's been getting closer to making a big jump. My company has used Avaya products for awhile now, going back to the old AT&T Merlin line even. They have a good selection of VoIP products.
To me the biggest stumbling block is how that traditional PBX'es are more hardware-centric and VoIP is more software-centric. Which do you think traditionally has been more reliable?
Consider mean time between failure rates for tradtional PBX voice services. Then consider a typical VoIP environment. I don't have hard figures, but I would imagine there's still a vast difference. Imagine a facility using VoVPN then extrapolating it out a little further.
If there are cost savings to VoIP and the PHB's for a company are placing that as a higher priority than reliability and security then perhaps things will continue to move toward VoIP. But I personally have worked as both a telco and a data tech and I think that traditional PBX'es are still more bulletproof than newer VoIP packages. If I'm wrong I'd be happy to hear...
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.
We installed a Telrad PBX system with VoIP, 30 VoIP phones for sales people around the country, and 85 hardwired in the building.
The PBX now sits in a 19" rack, along side the rest of the servers. Its console is web based for programming, its just another thing in the data center, if changes need to be made a request comes into the IT dept now rather then an outside consultiant.
"The word "genius" isn't applicable in football. A genius is a guy like Norman Einstein," - Joe Theisman
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 $50-90K for a Sprint or Nortel solution is just painful. Our local telecom people (read: the office managers that take care of the extensions and phone lists) can swap extensions to different jacks around the office and setup new voicemail. Anything more complication and it's a several hundred dollar service call. I'd welcome the days where that could go away, replaced with user-manageable software. That and the cheaper wiring costs alone are enough for me.
Nothing but the finest in meaningless drivel
Is it just me, or is the boy still crying wolf? Wasn't VOIP going to take over in 1998? I'm not saying it's not an excellent technology, nor am I implying it won't take over PBXs, but the article is no different than any other 1998 Voice IP is Here, all your pbx are belong to us! articles. Seriously, what's the hold up?
This story's headline fills me with a faint form of Schadenfreude:
IP telephony is the technology I pitched to my company's management, when they saddled me with thankless chore of upgrading our decrepit digital key system.
PBX is what they ended up buying.
org.slashdot.post.SignatureNotFoundException: ewg
Can people post howto's or give some explanation on how they use Asterix? There is little information on their web site other than a list of supported hardware. It looks like there is a 10$ 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.
There's no special wiring involved anymore, the terminals (phones) are computers in their own right, connected to the enterprise IT network, speaking IP.
It's not an island, it's part of the modern IT infrastructure.
And remember kids: Never trust a computer you can actually lift.
There's no way the phone companies are going away because they'll just con you into using their service to keep dsl. I have DTV & a cell phone. I have no need for a phone line or cable television.
But when I get broadband I can either pay $55/mo. for DSL & Phone or $60/mo. for DSL w/out phone service. Cable is $70 w/Internet or $60 for internet alone.
When the manual switchboards were replaced with analog/mechanical switching, it did cause some changes to the system. You couldn't just speak into the phone and be connected, you had to manually dial a number. That particular change cut both ways - it wasn't quite so convenient, but it was less prone to error and it did allow more people to have phone service.
Then, along came digital exchanges. Early digital exchanges had numerous programming bugs (to be expected) but these have now been largely ironed out. Digital exchanges are faster, more reliable and easier to maintain, but the changes haven't been really visible to end users.
Now, we're moving into the VoIP era. Instead of dedicated lines and switched circuits, we're looking at a packet-based system with routing. VoIP reduces the resources needed (it can - in theory - make use of any spare network capacity between the two points to be connected) and it simplifies some of the more complex types of call. (Multi-point phone calls over IP are as simple as a multicast, for example. Over a switched circuit, it takes a bit more effort.)
Will VoIP kill the PBX? It depends on how you define the PBX. If you think of the PBX as a person manually connecting you, then the mechanical relay exchanges killed the PBX. If you think of it as merely the mechanism (human or otherwise) by which two or more people can be connected, then routers become the "new" PBX.
Of course, true VoIP will only be possible with a migration to IPv6. There are simply too many phone numbers, which would need an IP address, to use IPv4. Also, IPv6 headers are simpler, which makes routing more efficient. This makes the complexity of routing over much more complex networks possible. Finally, IPv6 doesn't fragment, which means that packet garbling should be less common.
It'll also require much higher bandwidths. The Internet is just too crowded to support much in the way of high-quality audio traffic. Packet loss is a shade too high, and latencies need to be cut. Your computer can quite comfortably handle uneven packet transmission, but the human ear can't. To fool the ear, you need much smoother traffic flows.
Smoother flows mean you need lower hop counts. This means the backbone needs to be better connected. There's been a tendancy for backbones to move towards the simplest possible layout. That's great for economics, but it means that paths are maximised. Not good for VoIP. It also means that if there's any outage, there's unlikely to be an alternative route, which means that network segments will be disconnected. Also not good for VoIP.
Telephone companies will be around for a long time, because they're about the only ones with the infrastructure and capital to build the highly connected networks required for VoIP. This is not a time for telephone companies to be concerned, this is their golden opportunity to demonstrate their continued relevence.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Organizationally, it started happening quite a while ago, at least in some industries. I worked as an IT director in a "Wall Street" firm for several years, and ended up with responsibility for telecoms, too. That wasn't because I sought it, or even wanted it -- I had to get up to speed on a whole bunch of new (to me) stuff -- but because it just made sense:
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IT was itself the largest single purchaser of telecom services, since we had to provision links for market data, order transmission to the exchange, our private WAN, links to settlement / clearing agents, and so on.
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The majority of telecom services had to interface, one way or another, with computer systems (e.g., to receive market data or to transmit trade data).
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The PBXs and trading floor telephone systems were computer systems. (I can recall getting a new AT&T PBX installed. Their techs went to lunch while we were still testing. We found a little problem, which I looked up in the manual and fixed. The AT&T foreman was surprised at that: I told him "Hey, it's just a UNIX box.")
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Following on to the last point, evaluating and choosing telecom systems steadily took more and more "systems-type" knowledge.
Buying a PBX was just buying a computer with some specialized I/O hardware; and it came with systems concerns -- security, for example, or the difference in performance between satellite and terrestrial links for TCP/IP.
Now, of course, we are seeing things like Asterix and VoIP, which will provide much tighter integration. Traditional voice comms are still important, but they're by no means something unto themselves.Ethernet is designed to use four of the NON-VOICE wires in a standard 8 wire cable. All 8 wire, twisted pair (typically found connecting phones to a PBX or computers to your Ethernet HUB CAN run on the same wires. However, most people choose not to.
Basically, the savings is bull. Companies want ethernet separate from voice because they terminate at different devices.
In conclusion, all this will do is move everybody from two wires -- computer and phone -- to two wires computer and IP Telephony Device.
Again, you can argue that the computer and telephone can be the SAME BOX, and you are right the capabilities have been around for ten years (or even longer), but desktop computers -- to this day -- are not considered stable enough (even though, in truth most of them are) to run something as ubiquitous and important as a phone.
Kinetic stupidity has a new brand leader: Allen Zadr.
I run an Altigen PBX system at my offices, it does just about everything including VOIP if I wanted to use it. We have one T1 comming in that does both data and voice. 50% of the channels go to voice with 50% going to data (so 768kb). However if a voice channel isn't being used it gets switched over to data. We can then hook up a bunch of analog phones (single pair) or VOIP phones (10/100Base-T) and assign numbers to them. Oh yes, did I mention that the version of Altigen we're running is about five years old?
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
I use my copier multiple times a week, we keep paper records for anything financial.
I use my fax ALL the time, because if I need to send a physical document to someone, EVERYONE has a fax machine. If they have a fax server, than they get it electronically.
My phone system CANNOT go down. If a server goes down, people get coffee and get back to work, plus their already open documents are fine and they can save locally until it comes back up. If the phone system goes down, no sales are taking place.
The sales guys that bring in the money into the company aren't going to tolerate ANYTHING but reliable telephony. However, the "vritual PBXes" give the appearance of hardware, the flexibility of software, and a roll-out in the middle.
I can upgrade my Ethernet-based PBX with a few hundred software upgrade when I want new features. It's better than a hardware roll-out, but ultimately, it uses dedicated hardware for interfacing with the world.
Alex
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/ ---
Your grandpa never said, "Phones will be down for 30 minutes while I reboot!"
Ubiquity and Dynamicsoft have SIP Servlet containers implementing the spec; there's also a reference implementation here to play with.
is not going away any time soon. A good example is the University of Michigan which has run a large on-campus phone system for many years. http://www.itcom.itcs.umich.edu/telephone/about.ht ml They do have some VoIP service.
It is interesting to note that most students on campus (Ann Arbor) are going to 7 digit dialing (565 exchange) and that service at U Hospital is going over to SBC.
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!