May 2000

BY AL BRISARD

As the labor pool becomes more competitive and -- in some industries -- sparse, employers need to think creatively in order to attract talented employees. Some employers are finding that offering flexible work options such as telecommuting can be a cost-effective and attractive recruiting incentive. Telecommuting has become a popular solution with the advent of e-mail, voice mail, and faster Internet connections. Gartner Group estimates that the number of telecommuters will grow to approximately 40 million by 2003.

Telecommuters, also known as remote workers, benefit from flexible work hours and pleasant work settings, while companies benefit from less employee attrition, a greater pool of qualified employee candidates, and happier, more productive employees. Telecommuters, however, are a special breed of employee. They have the same business needs as the corporate worker, but their specific technological needs are very different.

Remote workers often feel disconnected from their corporate office-bound brethren. They are subjected to substandard services, and are unable to access the same functionality as their counterparts. While remote LAN access is helping to address the data connectivity problem, voice connectivity often gets lost in the shuffle. In telecommuting's brief history, data access was considered sufficient for an off-site employee to remain "plugged in." With data only, however, the telecommuter is missing half the equation.

PUZZLE ME THIS
Corporations are faced with a conundrum about the next-generation telecommuter: How does one maintain the benefits of employing remote workers while at the same time keeping them seamlessly and inexpensively connected to the heart of the corporation? Surprisingly, most corporations already have the solution close at hand -- and they don't even realize it.

Many employers are turning to the benefits of converged networks to get the remote worker connected to the enterprise. Converged voice/data networks offer telecommuters transparent access to both a corporate PBX and LAN from any remote location, while simultaneously delivering significant benefits to the corporation as a result of a lower total cost of ownership (TCO). Telecommuters can enjoy the full benefits of being connected to data networks while still accessing the corporate PBX for remote voice connectivity. Converged networks for the remote worker can be inexpensive and provide all the connectivity benefits once available only to the corporate worker.

The approach is unique: provide a unified enterprise-wide voice network that uses the existing PBX infrastructure and the data network. Corporations can use their existing phone and computer infrastructure to deliver the same voice capabilities to remote branch offices and telecommuters as they do to the corporate worker sitting in a cubicle.

In other words, corporations can take advantage of the latest technology without forfeiting existing investments in PBXs (which are very expensive) and data lines (also very expensive). This approach allows corporations to save money by lowering administrative costs associated with managing multiple voice systems as well as allowing all users, corporate or remote, to take advantage of the low cost long-distance rates out of the PBX.

Remote voice solutions are key to the equation. By placing gateway equipment outside of the PBX, connecting the same lines that would normally be allocated to a corporate employee, and then by packetizing the voice and signaling information associated with these lines to ride over either circuit-based data networks or emerging broadband networks, remote workers can now be viewed as mere extensions off the PBX. They use the same telephone sets, features, and applications (like voice mail) as if they were sitting in the corporate office. And because the information is in packet format (data), it can ride over most access mediums, including: analog, ISDN, frame relay, T1, fractional T1, xDSL, cable, and Ethernet.

Although packet voice is data, it is unique in that it must be dealt with differently than traditional data to ensure the voice experience. Voice is interactive and considered a "real time" application so it must be treated in such a way that it takes priority over "non real time" applications. The application must be groomed properly to provide efficient yet quality voice. There are several attributes in the packet world that can be utilized to groom or to deliver quality voice. These attributes include various flavors of voice compression, echo cancellation, silence detection, comfort noise generation, and jitter buffering techniques. Most packet voice and remote voice vendors embed these attributes and techniques into their implementations.

COMPRESSION AND QUALITY
When selecting a voice compression scheme, corporations must consider which attributes are most important in the application. The application and the network environment will dictate the trade-offs available between bandwidth, memory/MIPS, and voice quality. When considering voice quality, users and vendors must take into account the speaker, the environment, network quality, and fidelity required.

The two major compression technologies include waveform coders and model-based coders. Waveform coders typically minimize distortion and provide a more natural speech experience, but provide lower compression rates. Model-based speech voice coders (or vocoders) use a parametric model thus gaining much greater compression rates. Both have advantages for given applications, and each continues to improve. As voice coders get more sophisticated, more processing power is required.

Vocoders and digital signal processing (DSP) technologies are the enablers of remote voice. Vocoders now can operate at rates as low as 2 kilobits per second (kbps), providing greater bandwidth efficiency and acceptable quality. Based on the application and user requirements, vocoders offer trade-offs in terms of bit rates (which are determined by the degree of compression), complexity (the processing requirements, or millions of instructions per second [MIPS]) and voice quality (the user experience).

DSP technology is also rapidly advancing, and some chips are now powerful enough to drive the attributes that will improve the remote workers' experience. These chips will be able to dynamically adjust parameters as needed to deliver quality voice at a significantly lower cost. With one pipe for both voice and data, this will be critical to optimize the experience as well as the available bandwidth.

Voice quality is the most difficult aspect of voice transmission to measure. While corporations can evaluate some quantitative features of voice transmission through mean opinion score (MOS) and rate the quality of different speech codecs, audio quality still is based on the user experience. One thing is certain -- voice quality cannot be sacrificed.

BANDWIDTH TO THE RESCUE
There are many forces driving corporations to embrace the telecommuter. Ideally, in a converged environment, manageable end-to-end network performance combined with packet voice quality techniques are the true enablers for the next-generation telecommuter. In their absence, the next alternative is to sufficiently increase bandwidth. This solution, especially in the "last mile," will be short-lived. As more and more services and applications are delivered to the remote worker, the more efficiently that available bandwidth must be utilized. In the quest for better network performance at less cost, the issue is not how much bandwidth, but how effective is the use of that bandwidth. To maximize network performance for remote workers, corporations have to rewrite the rules.

Continued bandwidth improvements make telecommuting and branch office employment an even more viable solution for corporations. As broadband network availability becomes widespread through the implementation of DSL and cable modem offerings, there will be an increase in digital voice applications. Furthermore, while bandwidth will be more readily available and more cost-effective, there always will be a drive to maximize the services available.

For digital voice applications to move into the mainstream, we will need to see quality of service (QoS) issues addressed, along with voice quality techniques. That is why the earliest successful providers of integrated voice and data services will be partnering closely with vendors that develop customized applications in managed networks. As network realities are addressed through packet prioritization, policy management, and other QoS solutions, there is a huge opportunity for service providers to roll out value-added voice applications to hundreds of millions of business users.

BIGGER, BETTER, FASTER, MORE!
Having had a taste of remote data access -- to say nothing of the personal and business benefits of being able to work when and where it is most convenient -- remote workers want more. They want all the features and functions of office systems, including the PBX, wherever they are. And corporations, especially the Fortune 500, who have the most to gain from an empowered regional workforce and who have the resources to support total remote access, know a good thing when they see it. In the perpetual drive for corporate cost cutting, having employees who don't take up expensive office space is a good thing. It is no surprise that the Gartner Group foresees an increase of up to 600 percent in remote voice and data traffic over the next five years.

Finally, there is a philosophical change that must occur for telecommuting to be successful. Technology enhancements alone will not allow for greater acceptance of telecommuting. Corporations must become comfortable with remote workers and the concept of management by results as opposed to management by sight. As the corporate mindset changes and the technology that enables remote data and voice access becomes more common, the benefits of telecommuting -- increased employment and flexible work hours --will benefit the corporation, the worker, and society alike.

Al Brisard is vice president of marketing for MCK Communications. For more informtion, visit the company's Web site at mck.com