Tech4Biz | 30 Jan 2006 :
The idea of using IP, the highly efficient protocol that sends data
over the Internet, to also send voice i.e. telephone calls, is nothing
new. During the dot com boom of the late 90’s and early oo’s, several
Internet telephony outfits sprung up, offering free or dirt cheap calls
that mostly approximated to CB radio in quality - kind of fun for the
hobbyist but of little or no use for the average business.
Maturing technology
But voice over IP (VoIP) has matured considerably in the intervening
years and is now a major disruptive force in the world of telecoms that
your business ignores at its peril. That point was underlined last year
with Ebay’s $2.6 billion purchase of Skype – a company founded only in
2002 and whose main claim to fame was providing free PC to PC VoIP
calls. Even more recently retail giant Tesco said it would start
offering a VoIP service in the UK. But even before those deals savvy
computer users were embracing services like Skype which gave free PC to
PC calls over the Internet regardless of where both parties were
located. The popularity of such services has meant that instant
messaging programs like AOL Instant Messenger and Yahoo! Messenger have
added the ability to make free PC to PC calls.
Understanding the benefits
With such behemoths of the Internet betting heavily on the technology
clearly smaller firms have to consider how VoIP can benefit them. First
though a quick look at the underlying technology is required if you are
to begin to appreciate the benefits of VoIP over traditional telephony
services. IP stands for Internet Protocol, the networking standard used
for communication over the Internet. It works by breaking a stream of
data up into discreet packets which make their own way over the
Internet and are then re-assembled at the receivers end. This is much
more efficient than circuit-switched communications such as phone calls
which require that there is a dedicated channel always open between
both parties to the call. By switching their backbones to IP rather
than the usual circuit switched infrastructure telecommunications
companies can make much more efficient use of their infrastructure.
Replace your PBX
Business can benefit from VoIP in two main ways. Firstly you can
replace your internal PBX phone infrastructure by a VoIP-based one
running over your IT network. Either independently or in conjunction
with this you can sign up for service from one of the VoIP telecoms
companies that uses the technology to offer significant savings on
local and long-distance calls.
Tools of the trade
There is a range of IP telephony hardware on the market that businesses
can avail of. For one-man-bands the simplest option is a soft-phone –
software installed on your laptop or PC – and a headset. The soft phone
will normally be provided by your service provider, for example, Skype
(www.skype.com), and any headset that has a microphone that will work
with your PC’s soundcard will do the trick. A good starter headset is
the relatively lightweight Sennheiser PC30 which has a noise-cancelling
mike which improves speech clarity and voice recognition by filtering
out background noise (available in Ireland via TNS Distribution). If
you don’t fancy being tethered to your PC then Plantronics claims the
CS60 USB headset is the first wireless USB headset system that allows
you to roam up to 100 metres from your PC. It has up to nine hours talk
time and comes with PerSonoCall, software that provides the answer/end
and ring detect capability for most major softphones. It retails for
€299 and is available at 3G stores nationwide or online at
www.phones.ie.
The advantage of using a softphone and a laptop is that you can then be
reached and make calls anywhere you have a broadband connection – be
that a wireless link in an airport departure lounge or the DSL line in
your home office.
Tailored phones
It is also possible to get an actual IP handset that will connect to
the USB port on a PC, such as the basic Cyberphone K (again available
from TNS). It has the look and feel of a very basic phone but many
users may find it more tactile than a soft-phone and headset
combination.
If you need more functionality then something like the SPA941 VoIP
Business Phone from Linksys is more suitable. It can either be used to
connect to your own IP PBX or a hosted service like Blueface
(www.blueface.ie). It has a large graphic display, speakerphone,
supports two lines (software upgradeable to four) and each line can
have a unique phone number or extension and can even be configured to
use a different VoIP provider if required. It runs the SIP standard so
it can work with equipment from other manufacturers and supports all
the usual VoIP features like easy management and station moves – you
simply connect it to the network or broadband router at the next
location you want to use it. Linksys insist that its phones must be
sold with a bundle of minutes from a provider so for example, Irish
Linksys reseller Ethos Technology will give you 300 minutes for free
calls to Irish landlines from Blueface when you purchase the SPA941.
Reduce management costs
If you already have a small PBX or key system with a number of
extensions in your office, you probably find that you are paying a
considerable amount each year for the management of that system. Want
to move a phone in the office or set up a new user with voice mail –
then you are probably paying a minimum of a couple of hundred euro for
your phone system provider to send out a technician each time.
By moving to a VoIP system you can take that management in-house and
run your phone system over your data network rather than having two
cabling infrastructures to support. The upfront investment is also not
significant – according to Gavin Tobin, managing director of Ethos
Technology, a system like the new Linksys SPA9000 which is designed
with the smaller business in mind will cost just under €400 (although
you will have to buy IP-compatible handsets which cost anywhere between
€100 and €200 for fully featured models). It automatically detects new
phones on the network and the whole system is configured via a web
browser front-end. It works with any SIP compatible phone but if you
use phones from the Linksys SPA range you get additional features such
as shared line appearances, hunt groups, call transfer, call parking
lot, and group paging. It also has two ports for traditional analogue
devices such as telephones, answering machines or faxes.
Irish company Soft Telecom has also developed an IP phone system using
open standards and open source software including Linux and SIP. It has
a number of products in its VOX Suite including VOX Hosted, which
according to CEO Robbie Hanlon is most suited to the needs of smaller
businesses. “It gives you the full IP telephony services but we
basically host your PBX,” says Hanlon. “All you need on site is your IP
handsets and your broadband connection.” Soft Telecom currently works
exclusively with Smart Telecom to carry the calls but Hanlon says with
the next release of its products in the coming months it expects to be
able to offer service from a range of carriers including pure VoIP
providers.
“We don’t really talk about cheap calls to our customers too much,”
says Hanlon. “What we are selling is the idea that you don’t have to
buy or maintain a phone system – you can just rent the service from us
for €20 per user per month.”
Soft Telecom’s products are competing against the giants of IP
telephony such as Cisco, Nortel and 3Com. Cisco in particular has been
keen to go after the small business market and not just the large
enterprise. As Ivan Duggan, sales manager for commercial, SME and
channel with Cisco, points out, it announced last year a €2 billion
investment in its small business products such as its Integrated
Service Routers (ISR) which are designed to provide a firewall,
security, voice and unified messaging, amongst other services, in a
single box. Duggan says the advantage for a small business of
installing an ISR is that remote staff can log onto it using a laptop
and soft phone and make calls as if they were in the office.
However, many small businesses have traditionally shied away from the
big vendors because despite the emergence of standards like SIP, most
of the manufacturers require you to buy all their kit from them due to
their use of proprietary extensions.
“Cisco has traditionally been technology evangelists,” says Duggan.
“Six or seven years ago when we said we were going to offer IP voice we
had to build everything from the ground up so it wasn’t standards
based. It is moving rapidly towards interoperability from a device and
vendor point of view. But SIP is the lowest common denominator –
everything is running at Level 2 – if you go one way or the other you
can add a lot of value.”
Mix the old with the new
If writing off the investment in your existing phone equipment seems a
little drastic don’t despair. Many of the manufacturers coming from the
telecommunications world – such as Nortel and Siemens – offer systems
that allow both PBX equipment and IP phones to be connected to the same
VoIP server. The advantage of such a system is that you can migrate to
IP in your time – particularly useful for larger companies – but you
won’t get as many of the benefits of VoIP while you are still
maintaining your legacy systems.
A popular option for organisations with branch offices and teleworkers
according to John Cowley, managing director of Multinet, is to install
VoIP gateways for inter-office communications. This means that you can
keep your current PBX which is integrated with a VoIP gateway so that
users at the remote sites can be treated as if they are on an extension
elsewhere in the office. The calls are seamlessly routed over the
Internet with no toll for the inter-office calls.
“If a company is serious about this we recommend that they dedicate a
low cost broadband product for their voice connectivity – particularly
if they are going to have more than three or four simultaneous calls on
the line,” says Cowley. “The real benefit is in terms of the
productivity of office to office remote extension communications – the
cost savings are only seen as a by-product.”
If there are similar PBXs at both ends of the link, Cowley points out
that the two can be synched over a leased line and thus treated as a
single virtual phone system. As a result a receptionist in one location
could easily answer all calls and forward them to their destination
regardless of location.
No computers needed
There are a range of VoIP providers operating in the Irish market that
are offering services that by-pass the traditional PSTN networks as
much as possible in order to provide low cost international and local
calls. These include Blueface (www.blueface.ie), VOIP Ireland
(www.voipirl.ie), Smart Telecom (www.smart076.ie) and many others.
“You don’t need a computer system to avail of our service,” says
Brendan Carroll, sales manager with VOIP Ireland which provides a
service to hundreds of Irish businesses. “That’s a common
misunderstanding because Skype is connected to your computer.”
While these services can reduce your call charges – Blueface charges
1.4c a minute to the US and VOIP Ireland 2c a minute – that’s not the
only saving according to Carroll. He points out that many of his
customers have significantly reduced the number of lines they have to
rent from Eircom by replacing them with VoIP lines that run over their
broadband connection.
With the recent speed increases to the DSL services offered by Eircom
and those reselling its services he points out that even the entry
level broadband packages are now capable of providing a quality service
for voice.
“We have some customers running off the lowest level packages which now
have a 256Kbit/sec up-link,” says Carroll. “You only 20Kbits per line
but because of contention we recommend that you only have 4 lines on a
256Kbit up-link.”
That’s not to say that the traditional telecoms companies are totally
ignoring the possibilities of VoIP either. For example, Eircom is
understood to be currently developing a VoIP service and should
announce details in the first half of this year.
Reader ROI
Reduce the management cost of your phone system by converging it with your IT network.
Replace your PBX-based office phone system with a VoIP one and sign up
for service from one of the dedicated service providers to offer
significant savings on local and long-distance calls.
Reduce or eliminate the number of phone lines you have to rent by
replacing them with VoIP lines that run over a broadband connection.
Wit a laptop and an IP-based software, you are universally accessible.
Contacts:
VoIP service providers
Blueface – www.blueface.ie
VOIP Ireland – www.voipirl.ie
Smart Telecom – www.smart076.ie
Skype – www.skype.com
VoIP hardware
Multinet Systems – www.multinet.ie
Nortel – www.nortel.ie
Siemens – www.siemens.ie/communication
Cyberphone for Skype – TNS Distribution 01 882 9777