Gallery

Is your business ready for VoIP?

Posted on 9 Jul 2010 at 16:05

Steve Cassidy examines how a business should prepare itself for a full-scale move to voice over IP

Networks are a richly populated minefield of “double-dip” problems. The list of shiny toys that look attractive on first pass, but actually require heavy slogging and careful kit selection to make them work, is huge: pick any one of NAS storage, offsite backup, clustering or, this month’s topic, VoIP.

The most frequent double-dip in smaller business networks stems from individuals using apps such as Skype

Working from our mailbox and those guilty confessions coming from both users and the suppliers who work on their networks, the most frequent double-dip in smaller business networks stems from individuals using apps such as Skype. Their occasional, personal calls work well, and they conclude the network is ready for VoIP.

So often, it isn’t – and that becomes clear only once the deployment is up to full capacity, or while staring at the astronomical quote from a supplier, trying to work out what the gap is between a £5.99 USB handset and a £20,000 VoIP PBX.

It’s all in the detail

Companies often price VoIP simply as a collection of components: a contract for internet telephony, something capable of acting as a phone, and a central device for brokering internal and external calls.

Nothing is said about auxiliary requirements, let alone considerations such as staff training, whether you’ll be obliged to change your business phone number, and that awkward silence that hangs over the end of the sentence in the planning meeting where someone asks, “and the network…?”

Make no mistake, you can put together any number of limited-user proofs of concept. For example, you can use the free version of 3CX’s Phone System software, and that includes a licence for an unlimited number of extensions.

Alternatively, many Linux aficionados have taken the Asterisk freeware to create a Linux PBX appliance with excellent results.

Move further up the DIY chain and you start to run into a massive selection of boxes from vendors such as AVM, DrayTek, Grandstream, Linksys – just about every hardware vendor in the router and DSL modem marketplace is eyeing the small-business VoIP opportunity with interest.

These are dedicated VoIP devices that neatly sidestep your company LAN, linking directly to a dedicated internet service provider. Lots of small-business ISPs like the idea of taking over business phone systems and jumping into the confusing mélange that is modern, deregulated telecommunications.

This means they’re all working behind the scenes to decide what to do with VoIP traffic – not between the kit that’s in your office, such as USB phones and the networking boxes, but rather between the ISP’s kit in your nearest BT exchange and your router.

We had a chat with the man behind DrayTek in the UK, Michael Spalter, on the principle that anyone who personally owns an old Strowger exchange mechanism might have some industry insider viewpoints.

He agreed that there’s work to do on most people’s LANs to be VoIP capable, and candidly admitted that the balance of calls for help his team receive are divided right down the middle between network and ISP questions.