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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.)
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.
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.
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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.