Articles archive: Voice Over IP Telephony
This article was first published in the July 2003 edition of Business Brief magazine and presents the implications
and benefits of Voice over IP telephone technology.
What the VoIP has this got to do with me?
Alan Rowe - Sales & Marketing Director of Guernsey's Fusion Systems, outlines the changes going on
with telephone technology and how this affects businesses looking to the future.
We all take the humble telephone for granted whether it be a conventional corded handset in your office
or at home, or the now ubiquitous mobile phone. Changes in the technology as perceived by us the users of
phones tend to go broadly un-noticed so long as the phone does the one thing you want, when you need it i.e.
it lets you make and receive calls.
Behind the scenes however a fundamental change is taking place. This change does not affect what we are
used to doing in placing and receiving calls, however it will affect the way that companies organise and
structure their businesses. It will give any multi-site organisation more choices and flexibility in the
way they build their own communications infrastructure and give opportunities to deliver better customer
service, more flexible employee work patterns and achieve cost savings all at the same time!
Now where have I heard that before you might say? So let's start with a little introduction to what
it's all about. Well the technology is Voice over Internet Protocol or VoIP for short. The IP part -
Internet Protocol is the encoding of data into packets of information that computer systems use to talk
to each other with, both locally and across wider networks such as the internet. Putting voice into these
data packets is as simple as digitising your speech, breaking it down into manageable chunks and putting
it in data packets and then sending them off to their destination address. The device at the other end
reverses the process and your voice comes out of the speaker - whether a handset, headset or computer
speaker.
So what! With a VoIP telephone system in the office you get to bring your telephone system into
the heart of the computer network and it is this that opens up a host of possibilities.
First benefit - Administration: With Windows based software any organisation can then take on the role
of making day to day programming changes as required from the system administrator's desktop. This applies
to even the smallest organisations, thus no more calls to your telephone system supplier for configuration
changes - you have control.
Second benefit - Ease of use: Because the telephone system is now part of the computer network you can
tie an extension number to a particular staff member and instantly the two are integrated. When a call
comes in to an extension the user's screen can pop up a window to show who is calling - Caller Line Identity
(CLI) information, extension information etc. Click a tab on the screen and you can see which other
extensions are free or busy, if you want to transfer the call, another click transfers it. This can also be
tied in with your own software applications and bring up client information.
Third benefit - Easy voicemail: Integration with your email system means that you can be notified of
voicemails through your email system as well as the 'message waiting lamp'. You can then manage them on
screen from your phone manager software through simple point and click. Furthermore if you are out of
the office you can arrange for your voicemails to be forwarded to another internet email account for you
to collect at home, or left on the system for remote access.
VoIP Scenario 1: Your organisation now has two (or more) offices in different locations and
you want to present a single point of contact to the outside world. You also want to retain flexibility
as to which staff or functions work from the different offices. With VoIP telephone systems like the
Avaya IP Office you can connect several telephone switches together using the same data connections that
you established between the offices for data sharing (benefit - one network to manage) resulting is a
single phone system enabled by VoIP. The operator or staff member can view whether a person based in
the other office is on the phone or not and can transfer calls seamlessly from one office to another.
Inter-office calls and transfers do not incur an additional telecom cost as they go over your existing
data network for which you are paying a fixed price. Thus with VoIP telephone switches you can build,
deploy, manage and maintain your telephone system in one operation as you build your data network.
Scenario 2: Some of your staff need to work increasingly from home but you still want to be
able to keep in touch with them by phone easily. They have aDSL broadband internet connections installed
at home such that they can access company business applications and email systems. Solution - install an
IP Phone as either a hardware handset, or as a piece of software (softphone) to run on the computer and
this home telephone can become part of the same office telephone system.
Ahh, but what about voice quality I hear you ask? Data networks weren't built to carry voice traffic,
so to address this a principle called Quality of Service has been built into networking hardware.
This simply prioritises voice traffic over data traffic to ensure that an acceptable quality is achieved.
This can be built into your private networks. In our second scenario we use a public network that has no
voice prioritisation built into it, the story is a little different. As little as six months ago when
these solutions were first being deployed in the UK, voice quality was something less than that of a
mobile phone call. Now the quality is generally better than that of a mobile phone and improving all
the time. By being selective over internet providers this can be further improved.
To demonstrate that all of this works now, Fusion Systems in conjunction with Newtel Solutions built
a VoIP system using the Avaya IP Office at the recent Technology Expo 2003 held at Guernsey's Beau Sejour.
Newtel provided access to their public IP network within the exhibition hall and Fusion set up a secure
136bit triple DES encrypted virtual private network (VPN) between the Fusion stand and the Newtel stand.
On the Fusion stand the Avaya IP Office telephone system was set up with a digital and analogue handset
and these connected to the 'remote' extension which was an IP hard phone on Newtel's stand on the other
side of the hall. Data was also shared across this secure VPN network.
Different vendors of VoIP telephones have taken different approaches to the technology. New entrants
to the telephony market such as Cisco have taken a pure VoIP approach. Their solutions are costly and have
in the past lacked some of the features that you would find in a good conventional telephone system.
However with improvements coming all of the time, Cisco tends to be the choice of large and very large
corporations.
Avaya on the other hand have built products that combine VoIP telephony with support for conventional
telephone handsets to provide the best of both worlds for the small to medium sized organisation. Thus with
the Avaya IP Office you can mix low cost conventional handsets and deploy the system today as a conventional
telephone system whilst having all the benefits of IP telephony available as and when the business chooses to
use them. Added to this is a host of extras including internet gateway, firewall and remote access server
which come as part and parcel of the telephone switch being a truly converged data device.
So returning to my headline, VoIP has everything to do with you if you want to engineer a manageable,
flexible and scalable business and gain the maximum return on investment.
For more information:
Tel: +44 (0) 1481 721031
Email: enquiry@fusion-systems.com
