Is VoIP Right For you?

It is very likely that you have heard someone talk about Voice over IP or VoIP before. Voice over IP is of special interest to those who work in offices that rely a great deal on the phone for their business, such as law offices and financial service centres. This overview is meant to be an introduction to VOIP.

What is VOIP?

Put simply, Voice over Internet Protocol, or VOIP, is a relatively new technology that has recently been adopted by businesses worldwide. A Voice over IP program uses the Internet to make and take phone calls without using the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN).

Why use VOIP?

The advantages of converting to VOIP are numerous, and include:

*Cost Advantages

*Call Quality

*Reliability

*Mobility

*Functionality

1. Cost Advantages and Disadvantages

Pros: Many businesses gain an immediate decrease in their phone bills by over 50% after converting to VOIP. This is because VOIP providers don't route their calls via big telecommunication companies and so can pass those savings directly onto their customers. Line rental is one of the most offending causes of overpriced phone bills from landline companies - the cost of renting a line itself often outweighs the actual costs of calls made on the line. Line rental costs for Voice over IP are universally significantly lower and the bills seen by users who convert to Voice over IP reflect those savings immediately.

Cons: There are startup costs with a commercial deployment of Voice over IP - especially with regard to hardware such as IP phones and handsets. Even if a company wishes to keep its current hardware and convert over to a VOIP system, hardware such as a VOIP Analogue Gateway is needed in order to convert phone signals over to a digital format. Either way, a VOIP system usually requires an initial investment that pays for itself over time, the time and amount will vary depending on the degree of phone usage and call savings.

2. Call Quality

Pros: In the past it was somewhat true that call quality could suffer when using VOIP, but recent developments in QoS (Quality of Service) integrated into routing hardware allow prioritization of voice data to reach the handset prior to the transfer of digital data. Almost every experienced provider has maintained setups to provide customers with adequate bandwidth to prevent any signal loss and often have dedicated Internet pipelines in place that are solely for voice communication separate from other data traffic. This means that your non-voice Internet traffic will not interfere with the transmission of your Voice over IP signal, allowing you to continue Internet usage with no degradation of QoS.

Cons: If your VOIP system off is running on a single connection whose bandwidth is shared for traffic with networking or Internet data, your call quality will inevitably suffer. Likewise if you choose cheaper hardware that does not have advanced QoS features, prioritizing traffic over the connection may be either difficult or impossible. Another factor to keep in mind is that the number of concurrent connections can weaken or even degrade the quality and performance of each connection.

3. Mobility

Pros: A key component of Voice over IP is it ease and rapidity of mobility. If someone using VOIP moves (within an existing location or even to a new location altogether), there are no hardline to be re-routed or patched. They can simply plug the IP phone into a data port and the phone and extension will work as normal. Almost every recent Voice over IP handset operates off of PoE (Power over Ehternet), drawing its electrical requirement from the network cable alone rahter than needed an external power source). This portability is a huge plus, allowing anyone to travel anywhere - domestically or globally - and keeping them connected as long as they can get a live internet data pot.

Cons: Voice over IP mobility depends on the distribution of and access to an ethernet port and/or cabling. The cost and complexity of running ethernet cable is quite low, but anyone who has worked in or around a data centre has certainly their share of spaghetti-like cabling schemes. Access to hot data ports is a requirement in any case, and can be achieved with the use of hubs and routers as needed.

4. Functionality

Pros: A Voice ove IP system offers all of the core elements of a conventional telephony system and many intergrated additions. Many systems include options for voicemail with multiple inboxes and greetings, customizable extensions, detailed reporting of call usage, and other options. Since Voice over IP is all-digital, it can also integrate easily into other computer applications such as e-mail, faxing, web and video conferencing, and so on.

Cons: When usedon a larger-scale, technical capability and time to learn can be a fairly significant start-up investment.

5. Reliability

Pros: Long considered to be a major drawback to Voice over IP systems, reliability is still a concern for businesses. The level of reliability will depend on several factors, including bandwidth, the servers or client being run off, and packet management. One or another flavour of Linux is generally regarded as the gold standard for any serve, including a Voice over IP backbone, due to its reliability and adherence to standards. Failover systems such as automatic rerouting of failed outbound calls over alternative routes, or even falling back to analogue lines in the unlikely event of a provider outage or network blackout, can be configured to provide for redundancy,

Cons:A VOIP system is very dependent on the quality and consistency of your upstream internet providers. As discussed earlier, there are fail-over options and backup plans, but this is an important and too-often overlooked consideration with Voice over IP.

The decision to migrate to a Voice over IP system depends on your financial goals and current level of technical competence (or willingness to acquire said competence). If you are already equipped with a computer-friendl environment, Voice over IP can offer a flexible and extremely cost-effective solution that will be future-proof. An environment that is not currently equipped - be it unable to make the initial investment in time and money, or be it technologically under-equipped - may not be ready for Voice over IP.