Editor’s note: Richard Deason is a telecommunications consultant with Lightwave Consulting Group in Charlotte.
_______________________________________________________________________________________Is Your Business Ready for VoIP?

In the telecommunications world of seemingly never-ending acronyms (e.g. WiFi, WiMAX, DSL, MPLS, and VPN), one shortened phrase — VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) continues to receive a significant amount of hype.

Hardly a website can be accessed these days without a popup advertising VoIP service from Vonage or Lingo for residential consumers. Likewise, if you operate a small-to-medium sized business, you are probably receiving regular solicitations from phone vendors, ISPs, and CLECs about the virtues of VoIP.

VoIP has been around for some time. Actually, to be perfectly correct, packetized voice has been around for some time. Long distance carriers such as AT&T and MCI determined in the 1990s that the traditional method of pinning up dedicated connections for each call from New York to Los Angeles and between other long distance destinations was inefficient and costly.

So, they started chopping our voice calls into cells and interleaving them with other voice and data cells across Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) networks. ATM works great for mixing voice and data cells since voice cells can be prioritized over data cells. If not, our voice conversations would have significant delays thus sounding like a call made over a satellite network. A key problem with ATM, however, is that it imposes a cell tax on voice and data packets.

Then along came the Internet. Of course, in the early days on the Internet frontier, there were few rules and policies, which would have made voice transmissions a challenge. However, the allure of carrying long distance calls for “free” across the Internet was so great that the telecom geeks created a number of protocols and schemes- e.g. Multi-Protocol Label Switching (MPLS), Quality of Service (QoS), Class of Service (CoS), Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), and H.323- so that the quality of VoIP calls could equal the quality of calls made across the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN).

To top things off, the advent of Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) and cable modem services with their “always-on” characteristics fueled the creation of VoIP companies such as Vonage.

Now, practically all of the major telephone companies (e.g. BellSouth, Verizon, and SBC), the cable companies (e.g. Time Warner Cable and Charter), and the telecom equipment manufacturers (e.g. Cisco and Nortel) have jumped into the VoIP fray to varying degrees. Some of the providers (e.g. BellSouth) are deploying VoIP services in a more defensive mode while others (Time Warner Cable) are on the offensive prowl for new revenue streams via VoIP.

Additionally, there are many different flavors of VoIP. You might consider a single-user VoIP solution delivered across DSL or Cable Modem service from Vonage, or a premise-based corporate VoIP architecture consisting of an IP Telephony switch/router and SIP phones from Cisco or Nortel, or hosted VoIP/IP Centrex services for small-to-medium business now offered by some CLECs and ISPs.

Prime Candidates for VoIP

So, is your business a candidate for VoIP? Prime candidates include:

  • Multi-location companies with significant long-distance traffic between these sites. Managed VoIP solutions work well in this environment since calls basically ride for “free” across the IP connectivity at each location. If IP connectivity is lost for some period of time, calls can revert back to the PSTN so a company’s risks are low in this scenario. Additional costs include IP Telephony equipment and more IP bandwidth.

  • Single location businesses seeking cost savings. By using a DSL or Cable Modem service with an Analog Telephone Adaptor (ATA), or a T1 connection to the Internet with an IP Telephony system or a Hosted VoIP/IP Centrex service, small-to-medium sized businesses can save by converting to what is generally considered to be “best-effort” VoIP service. Just keep a POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) line or two installed from the phone company for fax communications or backup purposes or for calling E911.

  • Businesses with customer contact centers desirous of integrating all customer contact methods (voice, e-mail, instant messaging, web inquiries) into a single IP-based platform. VoIP calls can be converted into text messages and e-mails can be transformed into audio files so customer correspondence can be stored and retrieved.

    • Even if your business is not a candidate for VoIP now, take solace in the fact that VoIP is driving new innovations and lowering the cost models of your existing services such as long distance. Plus, you can find deals on “nearly-VoIP” services such as dynamically allocated integrated voice and Internet T1s.

    A recent Yankee Group survey of VoIP usage across 231 U.S. businesses found that 39% were using IP telephony in some form. Will your business be joining them?

    Lightwave Group: www.lightwavegroup.com