By Bob Bennett

Voice Over Internet Protocol (VoIP) is one of the latest of many technological achievements over the past half-century to help people communicate. VoIP allows you to make voice calls using multiple networks, including broadband. VoIP services convert your voice into a digital signal that travels over these networks. If you are calling a regular phone number, the signal is converted to a regular telephone signal before it reaches the destination. VoIP can allow you to make a call directly from a computer, a VoIP phone, or a traditional phone connected to a special IP adapter.

What's the Difference?
Traditional telephone systems and the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) have decades of proven reliable service. Since the 1970s, traditional telephone systems have continually been enhanced with feature capabilities and have adapted well to new technologies to address customer needs.

The Internet has been in existence a relatively short time, and was designed to carry data. Trying to integrate voice capabilities has been challenging. While the traditional telephone industry is highly reliable with a factor of "five nines" (99.999 percent) up time, the world of VoIP and convergence is still developing quality standards. Traditional products typically have a longer useful life than data products. Data products are discontinued faster, technical support becomes difficult or impossible to obtain and, therefore, those products become obsolete at a much faster rate.

What Are the Challenges?
Voice is a real-time application, so it doesn't like variances. It is critical that the message packets flow smoothly and are received in the right order. A few lost packets from a message can noticeably degrade the quality of communication.

To ensure that voice conversation maintains an acceptable quality level, voice traffic must be guaranteed a certain amount of bandwidth on the network, i.e., Quality-of-Service (QoS). With no QoS, issues such as voice quality, latency, jitter, packet loss and bandwidth may vary to extremes and problems will arise. QoS can be compromised anytime changes, software errors, additions or heavy demands are placed on VoIP-enabled networks. For example, if large files are being downloaded at a workstation, voice conversations can be compromised.

When transmitting voice over LANs, WANS, intranets and the Internet, bandwidth may not always be guaranteed, voice is compressed, there may be message delay and/or loss, and retransmission is not permitted. Packet loss is a common occurrence in data networks, but computers and data applications are designed to simply request a retransmission of the lost packets. Dropped voice packets, on the other hand, are discarded rather than retransmitted. Voice traffic can tolerate less than a 3 percent loss of packets (1 percent is optimum) before callers begin experiencing disconcerting gaps in conversation.

Voice and data are very different. Think about it. Does your computer ever glitch? Does it ever run a little slower than normal? No big deal; in fact, we've come to expect it. But what if your voice conversation runs a bit sloower ...tha...aan ....uuusual? Hear the difference?

Business owners need to understand the challenges they may encounter when considering IP-based voice systems and/or services. These challenges may include reliability, security, usability, scalability and functionality. A thorough network assessment prior to implementing VoIP will greatly reduce the risk of problems.

Is VoIP Right for Your Business?
IP technology is here to stay and it is being improved. And some business applications are especially right for VoIP. Companies with multiple locations can use VoIP to network the locations together for seamless communication and to save long-distance charges for calls between those locations. VoIP can allow people to work from home or other remote sites and still be part of the phone system with some or all the features available to in-office personnel. For companies that move employees around the office often, VoIP may make that easier to do.

For most businesses, rather than depend on a 100 percent VoIP system, a "converged" system offers the best of both worlds: the reliability of a traditional, digital system plus the flexibility of VoIP where and when it is beneficial. With a converged system, the phones within the company's "brick and mortar" office can use very reliable digital technology while VoIP technology is deployed for remote workers, multiple locations and for stations that need frequent relocation.
Implementation of VoIP, or any new technology, should only be done when it will add profits to the bottom line, put a company in a more competitive position or both. If it adds those benefits, then it may be a very wise decision. The first, most important, step is to select an experienced company with which to partner. A true "partner" will be interested in solving your business challenges and helping your company over the long run, rather than just selling technology.
 

Bob Bennett is president of COMMWORLD of Kansas City, which celebrates 25 years providing businesses "One Point of Contact" for telecommunications products and services. You can reach him at (816) 763-1100 or .