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SOA/WEB SERVICES FEATURE ARTICLES


May 10, 2006

Is IP Telephony Really an All-Or-Nothing Proposition?

By Alan Rosenberg, BlueNote Networks


IP Telephony is presented in the marketplace as an all-or-nothing proposition. This all-or- nothing characteristic comes at us from two different angles. Some vendors “interwork” with the PSTN and the legacy PBX, but the customer is directed to invest in their IP phones, IP phone system, and IP networking equipment. After all, that is the only way to see the true benefits of their systems.
 
Some vendors direct the customer to mix and match technologies, but they only support such a heterogeneous deployment of their own gear – all of that one vendor or you are kind of out of luck.
 
Yikes. Either way the customer is looking at a big stick approach to something as simple as a desktop phone system. It seems to me that the value of the “phone service to the desk top” model is diminishing rapidly.
 
Yes, the enterprise still needs telephone capabilities, but all fear, uncertainty, and doubt aside, “phones,” particularly “phones on the desk” aren’t nearly as valuable as they used to be. Users have too many other communication choices and want to be reachable in too many different locations to make the desktop phone worth the price paid for it. A quick survey will indicate that many users rely on email far more than they rely on the enterprise phone system today.
 
If we assume that customers agree, and want to begin to reduce the cost of the telecom infrastructure, haven’t we left them to the wolves dressed in business-casual attire waving order forms? The only way to cost reduce the telecom infrastructure is to move to VoIP, and the only way to do that is to either dismantle the IP infrastructure and rebuild with new equipment or to buy into a heterogeneous vendor strategy—or both. Right?
 
Whack. Our customers have to avoid the big sticks. The first big stick to avoid is the “VoIP is the only way to travel.” It’s not. The PSTN isn’t cost-effectively accessed via IP interfaces, and customers have legacy infrastructure in place that they want to leverage.
 
I’ve heard it all from our customer base—Centrex, IP Centrex, SIP peering, PSTN wholesale minutes, any number of telecom providers, legacy TDM equipment that run applications they do not intend to remove from that infrastructure. Forward-looking vendors are separating the “IP application issues” from the “IP transport issues” and where possible and cost effective for the customer, mating the legacy telephone transport to the emerging IP application architecture.
 
Don’t let your vendor confuse “Voice-over-IP” with “IP-applications-that-involve-voice-and-video-services.” Solutions that keep signaling and control functions apart from bearer channel and transport functions will help the customer break the mold of “It’s VoIP or nothing.”
 
The next big stick to avoid is that “VoIP is the only cost-effective way to reduce per desk top costs.” It’s not. Removing the desktop phone and disconnecting the user from the PBX is a great way to reduce per desktop costs. Customers aren’t going to be able to do this with all users and they’re certainly not going to be able to do this with all users in one whack (or we’d be back on the first whack, above).
 
However, some users are naturals for the move. Consider mobile users that simply must have cellular technology. They’re ripe for using the cellular handset as their office phone and the enterprise telecom infrastructure should support this use in the same way it supports the desk phone or soft phones.
 
Consider nomadic users—those that don’t justify the cost of full mobility but work from home, are sometimes on the road, and sometimes in their office. They’re ripe for migration to an IP-based system that’s not tied-by-license to the PBX complex.
 
As this is deployed, customers often find other applications facilitating this migration (for example, aggregating branch office users over the Internet) cause the costs to the enterprise to drop further.
 
The next big stick to avoid is that “The Internet isn’t ready to carry voice.” That’s kind of a misleading statement. The Internet isn’t one network; it’s a collection of networks that agree to pass traffic between them. Some of these networks are stellar at carrying voice traffic—Skype (News - Alert), Vonage (News - Alert), Apple (News - Alert)’s iChat and other strictly Internet-based systems come to mind as examples of how this can be achieved.
 
The system that customers deploy needs to be smart about technology (codec translations, firewalls, NAT boundaries, etc.), but using the Internet as an additional globally reachable telecommunication infrastructure is achievable.
 
As Mike Regan, our vice president of engineering, likes to point out, Voice over the Internet is much like the cellular network in the 1980s. You might not have had a tower in your neighborhood, and the handsets might have been large, but there’s no arguing you could make and receive phone calls.
 
IP Telephony isn’t an all-or-nothing proposition. Customers consider VoIP and Voice over the Internet as additional capabilities to add to their toolbox. They want to reduce the cost-per-desktop of services as the value proposition changes. Overhauling all of their routers and switches is simply a way to sell routers and switches; forcing a heterogeneous vendor environment to enable a suspicious promise of “VoIP is the only way to go” are strategies of fear, uncertainty and doubt.
 
Whether the technology of choice is a PBX, Centrex, PSTN, or cellular, interactive communication is important to business processes. Helping customers leverage their landscape in order to achieve this convergence is where the value lies.
 
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Brian Silver is chief technology officer with BlueNote Networks, which is pioneering the collision of SIP-based interactive communications with service-oriented architectures (SOA) by delivering the first enterprise-class interactive communication platform: SessionSuite. He can be reached at [email protected]

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