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VOIP, The Traditional Telephony Killer?
FrenchyinOntario writes "According to an article on IT World Canada's web site, an Ontario-based technology research firm says that 23% of small-to-medium-sized businesses have already implemented VOIP technology, and that traditional telephony companies need to adapt or die (big surprise there!) in order to remain viable. I don't necessarily agree with research analyst's George Goodall's claim that "It may be too late," since VOIP still suffers from troubling security issues as well as the possibility of SPITstorms. It's still too early to tell whether it will be a rehash of ten years ago when the telephone companies (even before the rise of the ILECS after the 1996 Telecom Reform Act) pishposhed the rising popularity of the Internet until they jumped onboard at the last minute."
I work in CLEC telecom sales, and there is nowhere near that penetration, at least not in the Northwest. We find most businesses are very reluctant to use a technology that may present their business in a bad light to potential customers. eg bad voice quality, even if only occasional, can create an impression of a 'cheap' business, unwilling to spend the resources needed to be professional.
Lots of business owners ask about VoIP, but very few seem to adopt it.
(Note that I am NOT talking about personal or home use - just a traditional, brick-and-mortar business.)
I wouldn't be quite so quick to say that. I thought that about Cell phones back when they were big clunky grey bricks, but now I have two; a bigger, clunkier grey brick (with a PDA), and a small, thin black one I carry around for it's superior battery life.
Just wait and see, you might not even notice it; telephones might look identical to the way they look now, except containing tiny computers with IP stacks and an IP address list. You won't even know the difference.
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
Congratulations. You have discovered one of the main differences between packet-switched networks and circuit-switched networks.
It's not impossible to get good-quality audio in a packet-switched network, but TCP/IP doesn't really include the features that are needed to do it right. (And that's by design, too -- it makes many things much simpler. For instance, it makes routing simpler because you can change around the topology of the network while connections are still established.)
TCP/IP is optimized for bulk data transfers and getting the most efficient utilization out of your equipment, which is a different goal than reliable, real-time transfers. That's why voice over IP is cheap but not always the greatest quality. It is, fundamentally, a hack. Yes, there are tricks that make it work better, but it is still basically a hack at its core. (Note that I'm talking about doing VoIP over your broadband connection, as opposed to solutions that business use, where they have full control over the network.)
Don't get me wrong -- I think the ILECs (traditional phone companies) are a bunch of lazy, aging, greedy bastards who'd love to have their monopolies preserved and will probably fight dirty to make it happen. But they do have a pretty good network in place, and they've had many decades to refine it, and it works well, and there are never dropouts during a conversation due to network congestion. (Yes, sometimes it's not possible to place a call because "all circuits are busy", but once you place one, if the equipment isn't damaged, then the quality is virtually flawless 99.999% of the time.)
I have noticed a lot of people complain about the quality of their VoIP service. What I haven't seen is the equipment they are using. Are they using a dedicated VoIP phone (ie Cisco 79xx) or are they running it through their PC.
:)
In theory - VoIP has the potential to be of higher quality than regular copper. The copper still has to go back to the exchange - then jump off on a T1/E1 back bone. That reduces the data used per time slot to around 64Kbit (E1). VoIP bandwidth requirements depend primarily on the codec and protocol being used.
I have been playing with Asterisk using AIX and G.711 and found the quality going from Australia to the US and back to Australia again to be quite awesome. I have a dedicated Asterisk server (running on a Dell 8100 Laptop) and connected to a Cisco 7940. The person I am speaking to is using a VoIP phone connected using SIP and G.711. We are utilising an American Free World Dialup Server. Both connections are TPG 1500/256. I have tested this connection during lengthy Diablo II games.
Where they don't have money invested is VoIP
Really? That's the exact opposite of everything I've read, especially when it comes to AT&T. I've read a few articles about how some surprisingly large percentage of their traffic is VoIP, and they only intend to expand further in this category.
Maybe the big names don't provide VoIP into residential homes where you see a brand name on a bill each month, but from what I've read, they're providing it to a lot of businesses, and do the infrastructure for some of the residential providers.
Anyone with better insight is encouraged to post references, since I don't have anything better than my scattered memory.
-- I'm old enough to have lived through six different meanings of the word "hacker."
SPam over Internet Telephony. It's the second to last entry on it over on Everything2.
This sig no verb.
...is if the VoIP that companies are switching to is for internal only, or actually using VoIP to talk to the world... Case in point: A regional retail chain that I worked for until recently had several new locations open this year. All of these new locations had Avaya VoIP phones (desk phones and cordless, using the WiFi access points installed for other use as well). Along with an Avaya box that prioritizes the VoIP traffic over any other network traffic, we never had an audio quality issue in the time that I was there. Now, when we called outside of the building, it got sent out through regular copper...
Nope, I work for a company that does almost exactly what the parent said.. Remember, this is VoIP, the voice traffic is all IP data packets going into the router. All 24 timeslots on the T1 are allocated to data. The cisco/adtran router filters out the incomming voice traffic packets (which are addressed to the router itself anyway), processes them via onboard DSPs that connect to FXS/CAS/PRI voice cards to talk directly to the existing office/home phone systems (or passes the SIP stuff on to the lan to connect to IP phone systems), and does it all in reverse for outbound (injects the packets back into the T1 addressed for the central callswitch, or SIP phone). The bandwidth is "dynamically allocated" in the sense that voice packets share all the same channel space/timeslots on the T1 as your internet data, but voice has higher priority via QOS, so the fewer calls you have, the more bandwidth, no rechannelizing T1's necessary.
tm
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The confusion here is that VoIP stands for two related, but different, things. TFA was (as far as I can tell) just about using IP internally to your building to replace your PBX and phone-specific wiring. At the edge of your company, the calls would be sent over regular phone lines. The article wasn't very explicit about this, but given comments about things like avoiding two sets of wiring, that's what I'm pretty sure they were talking about.
Something like iConnectHere, Vonage, etc, are about sending voice over the internet. And in this case it is a lot harder to make sure you are getting the quality of service that you need for voice.
These two different ways of using VoIP both have the potential to be revolutionary, but in different ways. In one cases it is the PBX vendor in the crosshairs, in the other the long-distance or local phone company.
I am the PABX Administrator for a medium-large (over 1500 staff) organisation. I work in the Comms section under a Comms Manager who only has a Data background, not voice.
My manager is constantly telling me that our traditional PABX will be replaced by IP Telephony, and soon.
We had one of our core data switches fail the other week. Our network has redundancy built in, but everything slowed to a crawl. I asked my Manager how Staff would have felt about not being able to use their phones if they were using IP Telephony. His response was that when IP Telephony is introduced, it will be connected to a physically separate network to our traditional data network. This is required because phones are an essential part of our business. There is no way that duplicating our data network to service IP telephony is going to save money vs. a TDM PABX.
Our PABX has NEVER had any down time (apart from scheduled after hours maintenance or changes) in over 15 years. None. How many of you can say the same about your Data network at work?
I see huge benefits with using VOIP, but in the right situations. Got a small office at a remote location that doesn't critically rely on phones? IP Telephony is the solution for you.
Large organisation where phone services are critical to day to day operation, why risk it with IP telephony?
Where I have used VOIP is for voice trunking over our data network to remote sites. Works great and can save a fair bit on phone calls, depending on the distance and your call rates of course.
By the way, I also help to support our data network as well so if we do finally go IP Telephony I won't be out of a job.
Shitdrummer.
I don't see a problem as long as there is backup... I don't recall ever losing our phone line at work, I do recall many times losing internet. There are many times in business when an hour of not being able to use the phone could cost more than the savings from VOIP over a decade....
Yeah, that's kinda where I am on the subject. PLUS...There are lots of things in our infrastructure that REQUIRE a phone line and are too important to leave up to VOIP right now. Security systems come to mind.
I really wanted to sell my company on VOIP as a cost savings measure and since everyone hates our phone system. I figured I could get asterick and VOIP and save the company thousands of dollars a month but when I started doing the research, it just didn't make sense.
You'll have that sometimes...