In which your correspondent observes a number of VoIP deployments, yet fails to notice a change.
In his unceasing struggles to earn his daily pint, your correspondent spends a fair amount of time on the premises of his clients. I should add that these clients represent the best and brightest of Silicon Valley, and a finer and more honorable collection of people can’t be found this side of a Nobel Prize committee. Many of these clients have replaced those tiresome, semi-proprietary office phone systems with new VoIP phones. Oddly, the new VoIP phones look the same as those tiresome older phones. They have the usual 12-key pad that we all understand, and the usual several-more buttons about whose function we’re never quite sure.
Ahh, but surely these new phones are easier to use. Dial-by-name, of course. Er, no? Quaint. I still have to enter the numerical address of the endpoint I wish to call? A bit like sending email to Eudora_client@192.168.81.103.
Reduced infrastructure, though. Well, once we pulled the extra cat-5 and installed the PoE gear. Then it was a snap to plug the phones in. We did rip out that funky old PABX, though. It was replaced with a funky new Dell server to run the VoIP software.
Yes, but the improved reliability of the converged infrastructure! We’re replaced SS7 - it’s been around for years; it must be out of fashion. We’ll use SIP now. It has a wee bit of field experience, though it’s a newbie compared to SS7.
Well, there is one unarguable difference. VoIP is digital. Err, well, so was the old stuff. But VoIP has longer packets that the old, 1-byte TDM packets. That’s a difference sure to appeal to any user.
Cost savings, no doubt. We fired the poorly-paid guy who maintained the old phone system, and replaced him with a highly-paid MCSE-certified IT professional. Happily, he brings to telephone system support the same level of cheerful help he brings to desktop PC support.
After considerable research (most of a bottle of Laphroig) I have identified one clear advantage to VoIP - it’s helped the sales performance of a number of VoIP vendors. Clearly a solution was needed to the problem of getting corporations to replace their fully functional phone systems.
Perhaps Vonage’s difficulties stem from the fact that, when all is said and done, it’s no cheaper to run a consumer phone company with variable-length packets than it is to run one with fixed-length packets.
Your correspondent awaits a Skype-like client for VoIP. No phone numbers, please, I wish to call humans, not station instruments.
If ISDN was Innovations Subscribers Don’t Need, perhaps VOIP is Very Overrated unImproved Phone.
posted
The writer makes a good point, what is the difference. I think many people apply VoIP much like electronic voting machines have been done- a solution in search of a problem. They get VoIP not because it's better, or provides things they need, but because it's the latest technology.
The author did get the converged networks bit correct, but I think he also misses some advantages to VoIP. Site-to-site IP links can save a bundle over point to point T1's. With an IP pbx you can (depending on who makes it) offer interactive services to your customers and deploy other similar features that are far more costly with old analog PBXs. Videoconferencing is as simple as buying people video IP phones or videochat software (expensive or impossible with a standard PBX). Expansion is also quite easy. And I think that possibly the biggest point missed out on is that the best is yet to come- sure we don't have dial by name or anything like that yet, but wait a few years...
So my overall point is that one must keep a number of things in mind. At the moment, there's little reason to tear out a perfectly good analog PBX and replace it with VoIP unless you are rewiring your building, have expanded beyond its capacity, or require VoIP style features. But at the same time, I think that for somebody buying or doing a full upgrade, buying analog gear isn't really a good investment.
Disclaimer- I'm an Asterisk guy, so anything i say about VoIP is slightly *-slanted
-------------------- A time is coming when men will go mad, and when they see someone who is not mad, they will attack him saying, "You are mad, you are not like us." -Abba Anthony Posts: 39 | From: Connecticut | Registered: Sep 2006
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[This is my (somewhat stale) response to Oliver's original post]
As both a huge VoIP advocate and senior networking consultant, I’ve been meaning for some time to assemble a robust response to Oliver’s earlier questioning of the burgeoning enthusiasm for VoIP. At the risk of vying with the prophet Zarquon for tardiness, here is my attempt to shed some light on some of the salient questions Oliver has raised, and thereby dispel some of the confusion that I still see surrounding VoIP in the corner offices. And in deference to our colleagues over at the tech support board at Sundance Communications, I’m cross-posting this as a comment to Oliver’s original thread which was picked up there.
Before I go into why I think VoIP is such a great thing, I think first we need to clarify just what we mean by "VoIP" in the first place. There are several ways to interpret the term, and unfortunately I think that the idea that the term can mean different things in different contexts is not at all well understood, especially by executives (I know of a CIO who, already having various wrong-headed ideas about voice technology in general, banned the use of EVDO-capable cell phones because he thought they were using VoIP, and that VoIP was insecure). There are five basic ideas (that I know of) the term can refer to:
1. The various signalling and transmission protocols used to encode analog voice signals and then transmit them over packet data networks using the Internet-standard IP protocol for processing by different endpoints. 2. The use of asynchronous packet data networks to carry voice signals, as opposed to the old skool method of isochronous circuit-switched TDM networks. (Wikipedia is your friend if that– or indeed anything else I’m writing– doesn’t make much sense). 3. The use of a single homogenous packet switched network to carry both voice and data traffic 4. The use of the particular packet switched data network called the Internet to carry voice traffic 5. An "Enterprise 2.0" buzzword referring to enterprise voice solutions that enable sophisticated unified messaging, flat-rate long distance, free international calling, and follow-me services, regardless of the technologies used to provide those services
While I end up touching on each of these concepts throughout this article, I will attempt to identify which definition I am referring to at a given point. Clarifications now having been made, let’s move on to my response to Oliver’s implicit question of "What was the point of VoIP again? I seem to have missed it." By way of elucidation, I will claim that there are really two key advantages to voice/data convergence (and I would also contend that anything beyond these are chimeric), of which VoIP (in the sense of meaning #3) is the primary enabling technology:
1) We will call the first advantage "unified infrastructure", again per meaning #3. You only need to worry about a single information delivery infrastructure within a building. This is, IMNSHO, the biggest and best point about VoIP. No more split plant, no more having to run the voice wires separate from the data, etc. And, the same skillsets used to maintain the wiring for the computers work for the phones, too. Another big win from doing this is that you can take your VoIP phones wireless, and get rid of the cabling altogether if so desired. "We’ve had wireless phones for decades", you say? Yes, but here again, it’s not the concept so much as the implementation that is an order of magnitude improvement. Unless you’ve been toiling in the IT boiler room for a good part of your career (as I have had the dubious honor of doing), the advantages of being able to jettison half of the extant physical communications infrastructure may seem somewhat underwhelming. But believe me, this is a huge win.
Building on this point, WiFi phones can then be connected far more cheaply, easily, and reliably than their older analog or digital counterparts, and with a far richer feature set. It’s important to keep in mind that, say, a Cisco or Aastra WiFi SIP phone differs substantially from the typical home cordless, or even a cell phone. The plethora of features available on legacy PBX phones (call forwarding, voice mail, conferencing, do-not-disturb features, and especially multiline appearances) are present on a WiFi phone. This is not the case with a mere cordless phone, most of which simply take one or two "analog lines" and make those available on the handset with the PBX features unavailable or hidden in cryptic button sequences that not even the PBX engineers can remember. Sure, the big name legacy PBX vendors like Avaya and NorTel make "cordless PBX phones", but these things cost the earth, have limited range, and their roaming capabilities around, say, an office park campus are a joke. None of these limitations apply to WiFi phones (assuming a properly designed wireless data infrastructure– a topic for another post, to be sure).
2) We will call the second advantage "unified services". There are several aspects to this, but VoIP magic isn’t about applying Nyquist algorithms to acoustic signals; as Oliver notes, that’s old hat. VoIP is about using open encoding and transmission formats that can finally be "gotten at" by any developer who wants to take the time to dig into them. The idea of third parties having access to the digitized voice streams in legacy PBX systems was all but unheard of. Not that the VoIP PBX’s themselves aren’t a healthy swath of proprietary moat-and-castle architecture (although see further observations below), but the idea behind using open standards for encoding and signalling is that anyone who bothers to can make hardware or software that can interact with the PBX and add value. There’s been some low hanging fruit already tackled because of this:
You can finally get your voice mail in our Outlook in-box as wave files. Called "unified messaging", the fact that the voicemail is recorded in a portable file format, and that the file is then exported from the PBX, is another advantage of "VoIP" (meaning #4 this time). Could this have been done with a legacy PBX? Yes, but, going proprietary on the systems and resisting open standards for CTI (Computer Telephony Integration) made the vendors more money– or so they thought.
As noted by Oliver, the same funky Dell servers that run the corporate apps now run the PBX. Seems like a trivial point, but actually its a huge advantage because for the first time the process for making and managing backups of the PBX and voicemail configurations and databases is straightforward; indeed, it’s standard industry best practices for data backups. Previously, most PBX’s relied either on local backups in proprietary formats, or, for the rara avis that did have a tape or floppy drive, the backups either required excessive babysitting and/or (all too typically), didn’t really back up all the data in the system. Anyone who has had the painful experience of dealing with an NEC PBX knows all too well what I’m on about.
I said above that the VoIP magic is about open call signalling and transmission formats. It can be argued that the old "Bellcore standards" implemented in the legacy TDM networks were open; there’s a thriving ecosystem of data and telecommunications end points out there because of it. But this is an extremely telling point– because that wasn’t always the case. Before the AT&T monopoly breakup in the early 80’s, that rich ecosystem of "third party" telecommunications products– and associated services– didn’t exist. The original deregulation ushered in an unprecedented boom in new telecom and datacom technologies.
It’s my contention– and that of other VoIP advocates– that the open, LAN based signalling standards of the VoIP revolution are going to engender the same type of transformative dynamics in IT. I mentioned above that currently the corporate PBX is still surrounded by a moat of proprietary protection; this is as true for Cisco and Avaya "VoIP" PBX’s as it was for their legacy NorTel and AT&T predecessors. But there are two aspects in which this landscape is changing before our eyes:
First, as noted above, while the switch software itself may be proprietary, because of the open signalling standards, it is possible to connect non-proprietary endpoints to the proprietary PBX’s, such as fax adapters, desk phones, and the noted WiFi phones. Second, and of far greater import, the proprietary PBX is itself under siege, chiefly from an open source project called Asterisk. Asterisk is nothing more nor less than an open source PBX, a freely available counterpart to Cisco and Avaya’s monolitic call processing software. Admittedly, Asterisk doesn’t– yet– have the sophistication of its commercial forebears, but this is changing fast. And not only is the number of devices it supports vast (any VoIP phone supporting the SIP protocol can be used, even Cisco phones), but (just like with the AT&T breakup) a thriving ecosystem is forming around it, offering an ever greater array of new products and services. Anyone at all familiar with the rise of open source software should realize just how large the import of such a project and its effects are. And for the SMB market, Asterisk offers the same tantalizing promise for telephony as other open source projects do for other areas of IT: all the key features and functionality needed from the high-end, financially burdensome commercial products, but at a mere fraction of the cost.
It is critical to understand that both the unification of the infrastructure and the development of open telephony infrastructure are both made possible solely because of the open, nonproprietary nature of the many signalling and voice transport standards residing under the "Voice-over-IP" umbrella (meanings 1, 2, and 3). Just like the telecommunications revolution that followed the AT&T breakup (and launched my career in data networking), so I (and many other pundits) expect that a similiar revolution is already in progress following the opening up of the corporate voice infrastructure to developers far and wide.
posted
Paul, if that is your first post what will it be like when you get warmed up?
Posts: 3159 | From: Jacksonville, FL | Registered: Oct 2005
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posted
My, John, shall we introduce him to justbill? He thinks I use "them thar 25 cent words, gee, shucks". Paul uses the $1 variety and does not expect change.
Now, as far as editorializing, He and Mr. EV should be well matched but I am afraid Paul will be over-matched on diversified subjects beyond this most elucidated one.
Paul, when your career took off I had almost two decades in the telecommunications industry. The packet system was old hate to telecom. Computers are just the "johnny-come-lately" irritations to the voice world. I mentioned to one of my customers, a banker, who had his IT person in the meeting, that VoIP would solve an issue for him. The distaff IT person turned very pallid, shook with tremors, and said she would have nothing to do with "voice" on "HER" network.
Why? The network was down too much, as it was. If the voice and data were both down, now we are out of business.
So I am investigating analogue tie trunks. What a shame.
Hope you enjoy the BB.
Paul !
-------------------- Ken --------- Posts: 5248 | From: KS | Registered: Dec 2004
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Now, back to my reading.......(Oh yeah, I'm up to the seventh paragraph!)
Posts: 1468 | From: Fayetteville, North Carolina | Registered: Dec 2006
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posted
VoIP? People are buying it so there must be a market for it. My Amish neighbors sell manure by the wagon load, I don't want any, but people are buying it. And so it goes..... Mark
posted
It seems that I am confronting a situation where VoIP seems to make sense. My company is opening a small office where we'll have 2-3 employees on-site most of the time. We want to be able to tie in that location to another in the area for overflow call handling and voicemail.
We'll have to tie in this location to our data network no matter what we do with voice.
Our plan is to setup a small Avaya system with analog trunks from the LEC. We'll use VoIP on the data line to route calls to the voicemail in our current office. In our current area office the GM there just had a new Avaya IP Office system installed.
I anticipate call volume will be so low as to not be able to justify a point-to-point between offices. I figure why not just bump bandwidth a little on the data side to handle the calls between sited. We're talking about 2 simultaneous calls between sites max.
I'm curious to see how this works out. Fortunately, in this scenario I don't think even a day or so of downtime for VM/interoffice calling would hurt us that much. Worst case is we have to install voicemail at the new site if the proposed setup doesn't work well for some reason.
What do you all think?
-------------------- Sometimes you carpe diem, sometimes your diem gets carped. Posts: 261 | From: Maryland | Registered: Jun 2006
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posted
It should work fine. Tying offices together is one of the beauties of VOIP comes to light. We do setups like that all the time. I still don't see then sense in using it for much of anything else though.
posted
Thanks Ed. From everything I've read it seems that there's not much sense to going IP within an office save perhaps a small office without its own phone system. Even then, I get really nervous about the idea of down time that affects both the network and telephones.
-------------------- Sometimes you carpe diem, sometimes your diem gets carped. Posts: 261 | From: Maryland | Registered: Jun 2006
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posted
I think VoIP is a good solution in some situations but there's still a way to go in other situations/applications.
2.5 years ago in our old office location, I supported a Toshiba P4000 with 300 users. 12+ years of use and no major problems, no outages, no downtime. This was not a redundant system config. Oh I forgot to mention one hard drive failure. Also used the 300 model vm with 16 ports, no problems...Y2K, not a big problem, just a free file upgrade.
Moved to our new offices, upper mgt said VoIP. We live demo'ed Avaya S8700 and cisco. All but two wanted Avaya but those two were mgt and were scared about putting "non" cisco hardware on the cisco network. So we have 400 users under one roof, 100 more users split between two other locations.
I've been reading the threads and I have to agree, voip costs way more. Installation!!!...well, one prominent company installed but didn't understand telecom features, QoS, etc...so 8 months later paid 45K to have reinstalled. Still intermittent problems no one can troubleshoot.
Oh...other surprises too, talked a good game up front but walking the talk totally different. Oops, we made a mistake when we told you that unified messaging would take space in users email boxes...sorry. Oops, we forgot to tell you that the redundant backup power supply for your 3560 switches will only support one unit...and on and on...
DST patch...oops...sorry...have to upgrade your 3 call managers and oops...your IPCCe will not work with the new call manager upgrade so we have to upgrade it too...and on and on...simple three user conference calls disappear, the smdr software on the P4000 cost 2K and worked super on the 80 char serial output, new ip system smdr cost over 15K, requires it's own PC and still doesn't have the reporting capability...oh, no one can seem to get a DID trunk port to recognize both near and far end disconnect supervision using battery reversal...
Well, I'm on a rant... I started with SCB in '79 and have seen lots of changes. VoIP is here, is it ready? Not completely IMO. I think it has a place connecting small branch offices together but from my view point, it's not ready for large office locations.
Forgot to mention, MACs and maint costs on the P4000 were less in 12 years than 2.5 years using current system...that's important to me. Getting off my soap box now...
Posts: 68 | From: Tennessee | Registered: Oct 2006
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posted
DT98..trust me you are far from alone on this. One of the great things about being a big part of the internet is how to keep stories like yours from popping up on the first page of an internet search.
posted
It seems to me that Paul is correct about many of the benefits of VoiP, especially the issues about running voice and data over the same infrastructure.
I have been using Voip sucessfully for several years.
Where I differ is in his view on the benefit of Open Standards and the cost savings this will bring.
When I buy a solution for my business, I want reliablility, accountabillity and stability.
For this reason I prefer to buy from a major vendor with a track record, and am reluctant to use an Open source product like Asterix, because I do not know who to shout at when it needs fixing, as it surely will sometime during its life.
Posts: 54 | From: Australia | Registered: Aug 2006
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posted
Mobility and branch office IP trunking make VOIP a winner for me. Open standards are also a big positive in my opinion. The ability to design custom integration apps for instance gives us HUGE productivity gains. IP phones are every bit as realiable as other digital phones when they are placed on a properly designed network. Properly designing such a network does not cost a fortune, but it does require a little common sense and planning. Regardless of the technology, a phone system is only as good as the connection between the box and the station.
Our systems still rely on tried and true POTS and T1/PRI trunks for our PSTN connectivity at our offices. It works, so why change it, in my opinion (but thanks VOIP for bringing down Bell prices). We use VOIP for expanding our capabilities and saving money (IF it isn't at the expense of reliability/stability) rather than trying to be "bleeding edge" just for bragging rights. The "bleeding edge" pursuit can definately prove a costly one.
[ March 12, 2007, 12:27 PM: Message edited by: weissguy ]
Posts: 14 | From: Kansas City, MO | Registered: Jan 2006
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posted
Atypical Midwesterner's common sense reply about reliability and stability FIRST. Good call. If more end users thought like that there would be less issues on the VoIP/TDM front.
Thanks, Weiss.
-------------------- Ken --------- Posts: 5248 | From: KS | Registered: Dec 2004
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posted
Oliver here. I'm honored to learn that my pathetic scribblings have reached such an august audience. I shall have a word with that Paul person.
The barkeep in the establishment in which I am currently sucking up bandwidth has an excellent supply of a good import pilsner on draught, so I am inclined to write at length, and yet type badly. Do bear with me, kind readers.
Many of you have made excellent comments. I certainly don't object to combining the wired plant for greater efficiency, etc, nor the idea of garden-variety VoIP for new deployments.
My point is summarized in one word: Skype.
Gentlefolk, I do not want a phone on my desk. It's awkward. It takes space. It has an utterly useless GUI, one that would never make it into production nowadays.
Why, why, why, replace my over-buttoned Nortel station instrument with an over-buttoned Cisco station instrument; units indistinguishable were it not for the corporate logo?
Give me a better phone, one that follows me, like Skype, one that integrates with my laptop, like Skype. Do not replace my buggy whip with a titanium buggy whip - you miss the point, good gentlepersons.
Ahh, the next pint has arrived. Prost!
Posts: 1 | From: California | Registered: Apr 2007
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posted
What are your thoughts about using a Samsung system and their SoftPhone application? I hear that between their in-skin Unified Messaging to Outlook and SoftPhone for the PC's that makes the PC act as a phone, it a great combination for remote users??? Prost back at you!
Posts: 184 | From: Rowlett, Texas | Registered: Aug 2006
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posted
I'm sorry but I don't believe that VOIP is ready to sit on every desk in an office. VOIP has a niche in the market but that is it. A good rule of thumb for VOIP is if you expect cell phone quality you won't be disapointed.
The Samsung softphone is great as long as you have good bandwidth and you don't need to go from a LAN to a WAN and vise versa. I have used it but you have to change the programming in the switch depending on where you use it. Samsung is aware of this bug and had plans to address it but I don't know if it has been done yet. I have gotten a few Bluetooth devices to work with it also.
posted
If you are wanting a good quiality VOIP product I would look into the Shoretel product line. Works great for remote users and in office. No changes needed if you are a remote verse onsite.
-------------------- All In One Communications Mustang, OK Posts: 345 | From: Mustang, OK | Registered: Jan 2007
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