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General Information
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July 3, 2009
• Vol.31 Issue 18
Page(s) 24 in print issue
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VoIP Crash Course
Obtain A Better VoIP View With This Comprehensive Look At The Industry’s Top Trends
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| Key Points
• Because there are many VoIP flavors, it pays to thoroughly research your internal and external needs (as well as your customers’ needs) before deciding on VoIP products and technologies.
• Like other technologies, VoIP now exists in the cloud, where service providers deliver flexible, mobile services that are backed by global, carrier-grade infrastructures.
• A VoIP implementation doesn’t mean you must ditch your infrastructure altogether, as integrated services combine the best aspects of older and newer technologies in a cost-effective package. | | Let the butterflies begin. Your superior just tasked you with taking the reins on a new VoIP implementation, but you haven’t brushed up on the technology in years. In a market that changes constantly as manufacturers refine their offerings to suit increasingly demanding communications needs, a crash course in VoIP is a daunting proposition. However, having a basic grasp of current trends and technologies in the area can help quell fears and smooth the transition to an IP-based communication infrastructure.
 Inside Quality Of Service
Because VoIP implementations are subject to a wide range of issues that can degrade call quality, such as latency, jitter, and packet loss, quality of service is a major concern for organizations looking to introduce the technology into their infrastructures. Dan Litman, director of sales for ATCOM (www.atcombts.com), warns that there is plenty of confusion between private QoS-based VoIP applications and best effort-based VoIP applications, in which voice calls travel over the Internet.
 QoS can be more tightly regulated in private VoIP implementations such as IP to the desktop and seamless interoffice communications, where voice calls can be prioritized over a private network. Best effort services, on the other hand, prioritize voice calls as they leave the customer’s premises, making it more difficult to avoid latency across the Internet.
“Don’t rush into a decision,” Litman advises. “Take time to educate yourself on the different flavors of VoIP. Determine what aspects of communications are most important to your business and make decisions from there. How do you communicate with internal customers? How do you communicate with external customers? Where do your employees most often work from during the day? Do they travel or work from home? Do you have repeat customers who call in to customer service or sales? Once you have answered these questions, you will know whether best effort- or quality of service-based, private VoIP networking is right for your business. Many VoIP providers do lunch-and-learns to educate their customers and prospects on the different types of VoIP they offer. Sit in on a session to fully understand all of these different offerings.”
Real Recovery
One of the more prominent trends circulating in the VoIP market today is recovery, as organizations are finding that VoIP technologies can supply options for keeping communications intact during times of emergency. Whereas data centers using traditional voice technologies can lose voice service with no recovery options, some VoIP services allow calls to be routed to other devices and other open Internet connections.
“This feature is gaining popularity and rising to the top of the priority list because it ensures business continuity,” says Bob Paulsen, CEO of Unity Business Networks (www.unitybn.com). “If power is out, or if there is a snow storm, or if the building is on fire, you send [employees] home as if they’re still working, and the outside world continues ordering product and services, unaware of the difficulties.”
VoIP Heads To The Cloud
With most elements of today’s IT architecture finding a comfortable home in the cloud, it’s no surprise to find IP-based communication there, too. Although the technology remains in early stages, organizations are discovering loads of value in creating “virtual PBXes” through services such as Amazon’s EC2 and others.
“What’s exciting is that communications delivered over IP pipes brings with it an entire new world of innovation, both in the services themselves and in how they are deployed,” explains Charles Studt, vice president of product management and development at IntelePeer (www.intelepeer.com). "The emergence of hosted services and infrastructure—essentially communications on-demand, or what we like to call communications as a service (CaaS) . . . means these services can be delivered from the cloud.”
According to Studt, these services can be accessed anywhere and eliminate the costly deployment and integration of premise-based equipment. Further, small and midsized enterprises, which often find themselves strapped for time and resources, can boost productivity by blending their communications with other applications and data.
“Cloud-based hosted services provide these incumbent carriers with a way to respond to the free or almost-free consumer-grade VoIP services that began with Skype a few years ago. These consumer services have shaken the foundations of the telecommunications industry with the force of an exploding meteor. These services—which now include Google Voice, Jajah, and Yahoo! Voice—present a huge threat to incumbent carriers, who are losing subscribers, losing voice minutes, and seeing their margins reduced. The concept of making international calls for free or for a fraction of normal exchange rates has tremendous appeal for any business seeking to cut costs,” Studt says.
However, the call quality and reliability of these services aren’t always up to snuff with stringent data center demands. Cloud-based VoIP services, on the other hand, can deliver service backed by global carrier-grade infrastructures and provide the quality and reliability required for critical voice services.
Technologies On The Rise
In the VoIP world, technologies and trends come and go as adopters spend more time with the features and decide what works and what doesn’t. Currently, integrated services are enjoying plenty of popularity, due primarily to their ability to drive down costs. According to Paul Marra, vice president of business development at MegaPath (www.megapath.com), a traditional voice network might consist of a couple of voice T1 lines at headquarters and analog POTS lines at each of the remote sites, along with a data network that has access to connect all of the remote locations back to the headquarters. Today, these networks can be combined, where the voice becomes an application that runs on the data network—without sacrificing quality.
Marra adds that SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) trunking is another trend that’s seen huge growth over the past years, and most IP PBX manufacturers support and embrace the technology. “Since the number of concurrent calls is only limited by the size of the data connection, business can easily grow without having to increase the number of physical interfaces to their PBX. Also, since SIP trunking is generally offered in single units, there is better capacity management,” Marra says.
Finally, open-source PBXes are becoming more common, Marra says. Such systems are free to download, boast support communities that have thousands of people, and run on everything from Linux to Mac OS, in turn allowing IT organizations to deploy them on familiar platforms. 
by Christian Perry
Key Terms & Technologies
Quality of service: QoS requirements can vary widely by implementation, but in general, organizations must seek to prevent latency, jitter, packet loss, and similar issues in their VoIP infrastructures.
Communications as a service: By utilizing CaaS, customers can take advantage of outsourced offerings to handle diverse communications needs, from voice to instant messaging to videoconferencing.
Integrated services: Today, traditional voice networks are merging with data networks to provide better communications flexibility at a cost that’s more affordable than buying separate networks.
SIP trunking: This service can be connected to an internal PSTN system to allow VoIP communication outside of the organization. Data and voice connections exist on one line. |
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