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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
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.
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 don't understand your post. If you are saying that Avaya is only traditional telco, they have been selling VoIP equipment for over three years now. The last World Cup matches had the entire setup using VoIP and WVoIP services provided by Avaya...
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)
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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