Virtual Office Resource

Internet connectivity to a VoIP is like electricity to a light bulb. Without good VoIP connection no service will be reliable.

Cost effective mass deployment of VoIP relies on the public Internet, which works fine in most cases, according to Alon Cohen, executive vice president and CTO at Phone.com (News - Alert). Cohen is recognized as one of the creators of the Voice over IP industry.

“Twenty percent of the problems are from Internet service providers that are not reliable and may have some short blackouts here and there. However, I would say that about 80 percent of the problems are due to the router (the network CPE),” Cohen said.

It is an industry-wide problem, too, not just affecting a few companies.

The companies designing the routers seem to be forgetting about VoIP (through non-VoIP friendly NAT, non-simple QOS settings), or produce devices that are not stable, where the user is required to re-boot the router every so often. In addition, devices heat up if placed on top of another.

It all adds up to slow the growth of the VoIP industry – which continues to be a growth engine for the small business/home router industry.

“The home/small business router industry is not making the right moves to help the VoIP industry move faster and in fact impedes its growth by adding broken features and not supporting SIP and QOS the way it should be,” Cohen said.

For instance, broken services, like the ALG (Application Layer Gateway (News - Alert)), are added even though every VoIP provider will say it needs to be turned off for the router to work properly with VoIP.

There needs to be some mechanism that will enable a service provider to get statistics and connectivity warnings from the router, and some concepts, such as a valet key, for a service provider to be able to access the router and modify elements that affect its own service.

For instance, with VoIP you might think of enabling remote secure setting of NAT, QOS, SIP Settings, or ALG settings.

A SIP proxy could be added as yet another differentiation factor.

TMCnet blogger Peter Radizeski adds that NAT Routers do provide an obstacle for VoIP providers. He sees the problem as broadband modems are now incorporated into the wireless router and each consumer gets one for free.

“It's not like the VoIP companies couldn't send out replacement routers and clear instructions on set-up. (AT&T (News - Alert) CallVantage did). But that costs money and it is easier to point the finger at the broadband provider (ISP),” Radizeski said.

 CallVantage sent out D-Link (News - Alert) ATA's and instructions on how to set up the network so that the ATA is in front of the NAT router. That works for ATA driven VoIP, but not so much for IP Phones, as they could not be connected before the router being positiond on the users’ desks and not in the network rack, Radizeski added.

There are NAT Transversal solutions. Radizeski says that STUN [http://www.voip-info.org/wiki/view/STUN] is one way to sense NAT. "STUN is a useful tool to discover the presence and characteristics of Network Address Translators (NATs),” he said.

The consumer and SOHO market is a low margin, hyper-competitive space that doesn't leave room for tech support phone calls, Radizeski notes.

But most importantly for Cohen and his colleagues in the VoIP industry – if you add a feature please make it work. If you cannot ensure that it is working, set it to OFF by default and do not mess with VoIP service traffic.