Small and Midsized Enterprises Computing: For SMEs, VoIP's main promise is cost savings. But along with lower-cost phone calls, you can reap reduced complexity of the technology infrastructure. Eliminating the need to administer separate voice and data networks lowers equipment and vendor support costs. Productivity can improve, too, with the ability to use your office phone line from anywhere.
If you're a smart businessperson you're always looking for new ways to maximize efficiency and minimize costs. One of the ways you may be thinking about is trying out Internet telephony and VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol), which lets you use the Internet to make and receive phone calls.
Internet telephony isn't a new technology (it's been around for years in one form or another), but only fairly recently has it become reliable and ubiquitous enough to be a serious choice for business. While Internet telephony was once an oddity often plagued for garbled and dropped calls, these days a well-planned and implemented VoIP system can provide call quality and reliability that rivals mobile phone or fixed calls. The Benefits
VoIP offers benefits over conventional telephony, and they generally boil down to lower cost, less complexity and more advanced communication features.
The technology's most noteworthy advantage and the one that attracts the most attention initially is the potential for savings on telecommunication charges. Conventional business phone service can be quite pricey when you consider the cost of multiple phone lines, additional charges for special features like three-way or conference calling, and the fact that most providers bill business calls by the minute.
VoIP lets you conduct your voice calls across the same data network you use for everyday applications like Web access and e-mail, eliminating the cost of dedicated voice lines. Even better, VoIP providers typically don't charge extra for those added calling features, and most offer unlimited local and long-distance calling for a relatively low flat fee. It's not hard to see how VoIP will usually result in lower and more predictable phone bills for business.
In addition to the lower-cost phone calls, VoIP imparts additional savings by reducing the complexity of your technology infrastructure. For example, when you eliminate dedicated voice lines, you no longer need to administer separate voice and data networks. Since each has usually has its own equipment and vendors, you'll likely pay less for ongoing capital investments and support services.
Beyond saving you money, VoIP also has the potential to make you more productive by giving your communications a mobility it's never had before. Mobile phones already let you keep in touch on the road, but what if, instead of a separate phone number, you could take your office line with you when you travel? Take a VoIP phone on the road, and you can place or receive calls as if you were sitting at your desk from almost anywhere. Moreover, since your phone number is mobile as well, you can make "local" calls back home or call around the globe without worrying about cell phone roaming or hotel surcharges.
How it Works
To understand how VoIP works, it's helpful to compare it to how conventional phone calls operate. When you place a "regular" phone call using the Public Switched Telephone Network or PSTN it's known as a circuit-switched telephony, because it sets up a dedicated connection between two points for the duration of the call.
VoIP on the other hand is known as packet-switched telephony, because the voice information travels to its destination in countless individual network packets across the Internet. This type of communication presents special TCP/IP challenges because the Internet wasn't really designed for the kind of real-time communication a phone call represents. Individual packets may and almost always do take different paths to the same place. It's not enough to simply get VoIP packets to their destination they must arrive a fairly narrow time window and be assembled in the correct order to be intelligible to the recipient.
To improve performance, VoIP employs encoding schemes and compression technology to reduce the size of the voice packets so they can be transmitted more efficiently. Audio signals are also digitally processed in order to accentuate the voice information and suppress background noise. To conserve bandwidth, VoIP systems stop transmitting during lulls in a conversation and even generate some "comfort noise" to forestall the eerie silence that might make you think the call was disconnected.
VoIP uses a number of compression standards that offer different balances between packet size and audio quality. Generally speaking, the higher the compression the more simultaneous calls you can have, but the lower voice quality will be.
The Right Foundation
To get the most out of VoIP, you'll need an Internet connection that offers enough performance to accommodate an appropriate call volume for your company. A good rule of thumb is to have enough capacity for roughly one third of your employees. So, if you have 30 employees, you should have enough capacity to allow 10 of them to be on the phone at any one time.
Broadband Internet access is pretty common these days, and you may be wondering whether that super-fast cable modem or DSL connection you already have will work with VoIP. While cable and DSL connections are great for tasks like browsing the Web or streaming video, they're not always the best choice for VoIP, because most provide with lots of downstream (to your network) bandwidth and relatively little upstream (away from your network) bandwidth.
Case in point: cable and DSL typically offer download speeds of several megabits per second, but most provide a mere fraction of that (sometimes as little as 128kbps) for uploads. This type of asynchronous connection is fine for the kinds of tasks cited above because they primarily involve one-way communication, but making calls over the Internet is quite different. For VoIP, upstream bandwidth is every bit as important as downstream, particularly if you plan to use more than just one phone.
While a cable or DSL connection with sufficient upstream bandwidth might be acceptable for a telecommuter, home office or sole proprietor, larger SMBs or those that anticipate a lot of call volume will want to consider a high-speed synchronous Internet connection like a T1 line. Although they can be a bit more expensive and offer somewhat slower download speeds than some business-class cable or DSL service, at 1.54 Mbps in each direction a T1 offers ample bandwidth to satisfy the requirements of both data and voice traffic.
Preparing for VoIP
The key to success with VoIP ultimately comes down to proper planning. The scope of a VoIP implementation can vary according to an organization's needs and desires, ranging from the relatively straightforward using VoIP for local and long-distance calls or to communicate between a company's multiple offices to more complex deployments like call centers.
Since many firewalls automatically block the TCP/IP ports used by SIP and MGCP, you may need to add a device to your network to remedy this problem. These devices also improve VoIP performance by prioritizing voice packets over more mundane types of traffic so your calls aren't queued up behind, say, an e-mail upload.
Companies too often don't consider the impact that their local network performance will have on their VoIP experience. Since all VoIP traffic calls originate or terminate on the LAN, bandwidth-hogging applications or inappropriate equipment should be identified and corrected before they can negatively impact VoIP performance.