August 18, 2005 4:00 AM PDT
Perspective: Expect a Net phone evolution, not revolution
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Common wisdom suggested that you could save boatloads of money by stuffing long distance voice traffic onto the Internet and that exploding Internet growth would simply roll over the traditional Pubic Switched Telephone Network.
Yup, voice traffic was moving to packets, simple as that.
However, in spite of the ongoing hype, Net telephony, also known as voice over Internet Protocol, remains an early work in progress. Yes, VoIP is growing significantly, justifying the zillions of pundit forecasts and platitudes--but if IP telephony were a book, we'd probably be at Chapter 4 in the telecom equivalent of "War and Peace." Here's why.
The first holdup is simple economics. In the United States, Internet bandwidth costs about $5 per megabit per month. Bandwidth pricing goes up precipitously abroad. A megabit of bandwidth costs about $10 a month in Singapore, $27 a month in Europe and around $300 a month in Australia. These numbers are the equivalent of a cold slap in the face, given those grandiose cost-saving visions that VoIP vendors trumpet.
Another gotcha is the lack of prevailing standards. With all the hoopla around the Session Initiation Protocol, you'd think it was set in stone. Nope. Each vendor has its own version of SIP, so any company with a heterogeneous environment--that is, every large enterprise--is afraid of the interoperability hassles.
IT people have simply been down this road too many times before. Rather than rip and replace the old TDM infrastructure, it's much more prudent to slowly introduce VoIP implementations and let the vendors sort through some type of standards detente.
IP telephony also creates a somewhat ironic bottleneck in the network itself. We all complain about "Ma Bell," but land-based dial tone almost always works. No one worries about voice quality or power--it just happens. Not so with VoIP. Network convergence has been a sexy topic for 10 years, but the fact is that most corporate networks were designed to simply pass data packets around willy-nilly, not guarantee carrier-quality voice service.
Most companies don't have the Quality of Service features throughout their networks necessary for latency-sensitive voice traffic, while even fewer own the Power Over Ethernet switches needed to keep the phones working during power failures.
You'd have to be crazy to bet your mission-critical voice traffic on a network void of this critical functionality. Remember that old business adage: "When phones ring, shareholders sing, but when phones are quiet, shareholders riot."
Finally, there is a definite fear about IP telephony security that has scared off many would-be customers. There are lots of threats to VoIP: from a bad guy hijacking the phone system, to eavesdroppers, to all kinds of nasty SIP-based worms that use IP telephony traffic to infect the entire network.
Yet the biggest short-term threat of all is simply the poor state of network security. Lots of networks contain vulnerabilities such as servers and networking equipment with functioning default passwords, critical services running on unpatched Windows servers, active user accounts of terminated employees, and so on. It's pretty scary to think that some low-level IT administrator could easily trash the computers and the phones. Try explaining this problem to the CEO.
My purpose here is not to trash IP telephony. I see lots of companies using the technology internally to connect geographically distributed campuses and centralize PBX functions. As broadband continues to proliferate, many carriers are jumping into VoIP and offering a "triple play" of voice, data and video services to consumers, and network-based business services to smaller companies. Visionary companies are taking the IP plunge because they plan on making Internet-based phones an extension of their business applications. Middleware products such as BEA's and IBM's Websphere already support the SIP protocol, a true sign of things to come.
No doubt, VoIP is the future. But all signs point to an IP telephony evolution, not a revolution. Telephones are a given, and the last person to get excited about them was the guy who said, "Watson, are you there?" As an industry, we ought to help our customers move through a thoughtful and pragmatic transition, not peddle techno-sunshine and snake oil.
Biography
Jon Oltsik is a senior analyst at the Enterprise Strategy Group.
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IP telephony, telephony, VoIP, IP, network security
(Vonage) has significant 'traffic' issues. It is almost unusable when
any kind of significant data transfer is going through the cable
internet connection. We have yet to find a way to control the
conflicts. This is only for 2 users and one phone line.
We are still going to hang on for a couple of months to see if it can
be fine-tuned, but at 40% the price of the old land line, it is not
even delivering 40% of the value.....Very disappointing so far.
Vonage offers a "Bandwidth Saver" feature on their web site. Log into the Vonage website, click "features", then click configure for "Bandwidth Saver". Try a lower bandwidth setting.
In reality, VoIP needs to have proper planned and guaranteed networks for it to work. Maybe home users can get away with break ups in call quality but businesses cannot.
The article was right in some respects but it does depend on your supplier. Mass market services do not offer an end to end solution, leaving customers to figure out how to get the quality from their networks.
Our VoxHub business learnt from our early tests that 30% of installs do not achieve the right quality if the internet connection is not considered as part of the solution. We insist on it now.
VoIP is more IT than telecoms, to rely on it you need to have a supplier that offers a service above cheap call rates.
If you haven't got a Quality of Service router then get one or get a dedicated broadband connection just for voice calls from a reliable provider.
the frustrations. There are still many issues
need to be resolved.
It will take time for the tech to be mature,
usable and competitive with existing technology.
So, dont throw away your landline yet.
Example: It takes Internet 10 yrs to get to today
stage. Yet, I still experience network outtage or
bandwidth degradation occasionally on my broadband
connection.
The article states that the total # of VoIP subs went from 440,000 to 2.7 million from Q2 04 to Q2 of 05.
That is what I mean by maturing technology, a 600%+ year-on-year growth is a huge jump.
Internet communications based on SIP enable new services, new communication habits and integration of applications with communications.
Jon Oltsik may want to look at even one single item: Presence may be the dial-tone of the 21st century. Grandma, kids and most professional adults already consider it as a given, besides all kind of mobile devices that combine new communication models.
What would Jon give up in his business: Internet, e-mail and the mobile phone or the wireline phone?
Agreed that a business would be foolish at this point to run VoIP outside of your LAN/WAN. However, after studying Cisco's approach and the approach of others, I'm confident that they have the QoS issues out of the way in the LAN part of the equation.
A VoIP PBX works well if implemented correctly. Finding an integrator who does it well will be the critical factor.
- Just want to get my Voice across...
- by August 21, 2005 12:39 AM PDT
- Article is bang-on; interesting comments. Strikingly, Henry Sinnreich says that ?presence? will be the dialtone of 21st century. Point to ponder.
- Like this Reply to this comment
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(9 Comments)I agree with Jim Murphy that the VoIP PBX works well if implemented properly and it is on the WAN that we will have the challenges. The point is what does the VoIP help solve inside the campus? An intelligent PABX can do almost everything in the TDM environment including number portability. XML and other web capabilities do transcend the Voice terminal to sublime functions, but then is it phone? I will buy the convergence argument but when it emanates from the device that is standard. But as Jon Oltsik says SIP is still sticky.
It is in the WAN, that VoIP becomes attractive not just due to cost savings but the versatility of the options of corporate connectivity. But it is here that we encounter QOS, bandwidth and the issue of the formidability of the security or the lack of it.
In fact, even within private network, ripened IT people are paranoid about the vulnerability of the controlling ports of call servers to ?denial of service? attacks.
My rule: If you want a system to simply get Voice from one end to the other don?t use IP. If you want more, first ask how far does it help business; second, see if you can?t wait till it makes more sense?
VoIP is a very good example of a techno hype that by simply meaning different things to different people is continuing to capture imagination and gaining in popularity. The success of the VoIP in the corporate world is driven by the indomitable IT majority who saw an opportunity to take the Voice under their control from an often solitary Telecom officer. With vengeance they deploy the VoIP gear.
Well, if that is the corporate side, in the carrier space it is the post deregulation quick plugging operators for whom this is a boon. Most of them seem to think that the reduction in tariffs for their customers can be a unique value addition.
Hey, bashing VoIP is my favourite pastime. But it is undeniable future. It will grow because it moves control to the edge, it makes enormous possibilities, it offers wider choice, empowers users, but like all things democratic, will introduce the element of chaos that hitherto was blissfully absent from the Voice World. I prefer democracy. But during the transition I would still want my phone call to go through cheap or not.