Justifying VoIP
Bruce Hampel, chief operating officer of telephony integrator Panaseer, believes understanding of VoIP's real benefits has been lost as vendors clamour to sell customers on its potential to cut phone bills.
"VoIP is not a good technology to use purely for cost savings," he explains. "You make so many compromises in terms of voice quality, since systems that demonstrate very well often end up not delivering the same voice quality under a live load."
If the experience of early adopters has taught us anything, it's that VoIP needs to be carefully assessed in the context of individual companies' business requirements.
While it sounds great to save money on voice calls, it's important to think far bigger than that when building a business case.
Approach it the right way, and VoIP can not only reduce outgoing costs; it can actually increase revenues by improving internal efficiency.
One of the technology's most promising capabilities is its links to computer-telephony integration (CTI) in call centre and other phone-intensive environments.
This means that customer data and phone calls can be tied together as bonded data streams, allowing customer details to follow them through a support centre. Since customers hate having to repeat information over and over again, this feature alone can make VoIP worth the investment.
It can also be tied in with Web sites, with emerging technology eventually letting Web site visitors talk to customer support representatives through their PCs.
Such capabilities are rapidly becoming reality with the growth in support for SIP (Session Initiation Protocol), an IETF telephony signalling protocol based on HTML and MIME.
Designed to allow easier initiation of calls between Internet-connected nodes, SIP is a far more efficient alternative to videoconferencing-derived H.323, which is used for most of today's VoIP systems.
VoIP is also winning converts as a replacement for Voice over Frame Relay (VoFR), the widely used method for linking offices using wide area network links.
VoFR may work fine for point-to-point connectivity, but voice-capable FRADs (Frame Relay Access Devices) have fallen far behind more conventional WAN switches in terms of their ability to manage and direct those calls.
That's driving many customers to leave their Frame Relay links for data and explore IP-based voice solutions.
"The FRAD solution was only giving us a bridged network; it wasn't capable of a true routed network," says Steve Tucker, group IT manager with Adelaide-based airplane fleet manager National Jet Systems, which recently adopted a NEC VoIP solution in a push to improve the flexibility of communications between its eight offices. "We sought to combine those into one, and to add the ability to monitor the quality of service."
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