VoIP still scary for many enterprises

For companies clinging to traditional telephony, the great leap forward into IP remains a scary proposition. Never mind that it’s a decade or more since the first VoIP pioneers set off in their covered wagons. What will happen to call quality? What will happen to service reliability? How will users respond? What about the horror stories from the VoIP front lines? Equipment vendors may be full-speed-ahead on IP voice, but many customers remain skittish. That said, new service offerings and service provider business models – outsourcing everything from SIP trunks to, well, everything in the wide area – may take some of the risk, or perceived risk, out of VoIP. Consider the case of Spring Air Sommex Corp, a Toronto-based manufacturer of mattresses and box springs. Sommex split from its former US parent two years ago to become an independent Canadian-owned entity. One of the first things it needed was a new phone solution. The company had been using traditional key systems at its five Canadian locations. Calls were mostly local or to the US headquarters. Now call traffic would shift from north-south to east-west, especially to and from the new Toronto headquarters. That meant more intra-company long distance calling. VoIP and traditional solutions were both on the table, so were in-house and outsourced options. Sommex ended up outsourcing everything, including a hosted IP PBX, to Vancouver-based Radiant Communications. Radiant, a Tier 3 service provider, or virtual network operator, leases network capacity, last mile links and secure data centre infrastructure from LECs and other providers across the country and manages everything on behalf of its clients. Going with VoIP was not a decision Sommex took lightly. The company considered the technology to be still “in its infancy,” says IT manager Tamas Vesztergombi. “A lot of people we heard from were not happy with it. A lot regretted going with VoIP. It took awhile to convince the signing authorities here that this was a feasible way to go.” The availability of outsourcing options made it distinctly easier, Vesztergombi says. “We thought, ‘If we don’t like it, we can always get out of it.’ Whereas if you bought , you own it.” Sommex, in fact, was a prime candidate for an outsourcing solution. Radiant was already its ISP. Broadband links from each location to Radiant’s facilities already existed. They could be fattened to support voice if necessary but in most cases could carry voice as well as internet traffic. The company did have to buy 50 SIP phones to replace old POTS sets. But the pay-offs would be significant. No capital costs for on-premise phone systems – only a per-user monthly fee. No IT management headaches, and calls among the company’s offices and plants would now travel over Radiant’s private network at little incremental cost to Sommex. The company “did some math,” comparing Radiant’s costs to those for other solutions, including an on-premise Nortel Networks IP PBX. With discounts for bundling voice with other services, Radiant’s costs were 20% to 25% lower than the on-premise options, Vesztergombi says. And that didn’t factor in labour savings – not having to hire, train and pay staff to manage and maintain on-premise equipment. It also didn’t factor in intangibles such as the cost of miscalculating on assumptions about the size of on-premise system the company needed. “What would we do if we bought an solution 100 users and then went over 100 in a couple of years,” Vesztergombi says? “With renting, we don’t have to worry about that.” Renting the way Sommex rents from Radiant – broadband pipes to a hosted PBX – is a leading-edge option, but just one among several available. Most companies in fact still buy the IP PBX and host it in their own facility. The variation is more in how they move calls onto and across the wide area network (WAN), and how in doing so, they ensure call quality and reliability. Many still convert IP call streams to TDMA (time division multiple access) using gateways at their own facilities and send calls over the PSTN (public switched telephone network). Outside lines come into the gateway as traditional PRIs (primary rate interfaces). It’s a safe, conservative solution, but not the most cost effective or logical Clearly there are advantages to carrying calls as far as possible over IP fabric. If a company can stay IP end-to-end for calls between its own locations, it can centralize telephony services, possibly realizing labour savings, and extend PBX functionality – four-digit internal dialing, call transfers, voice mail, presence, etc. – even to small locations where it would not make sense to install a sophisticated phone system. And because long distance calls travel as IP packets over an IP network, the cost is typically lower than for PSTN calls. One possibility is to rent private, managed broadband pipes from an ISP or other service provider at each location and carry IP voice calls over it along with internet data. Better, because more secure, is to establish virtual private networks (VPNs) using IPsec (Internet protocol security) from each branch office to headquarters. The problem either way, says Jayanth Angl, a senior research analyst at Info-Tech Research Group Inc, is that class of service tags added to voice packets by the IP PBX are ignored once they leave the building. Class-of-service tags tell network routers to give voice packets priority over data packets, helping to ensure quality of service (QoS) for voice. Without class-of-service tagging, everything that nervous late adopters fear about VoIP – packets delayed, causing latency and echo, or lost or arriving out of order, causing jitter – is much more likely to come to pass. The problem is compounded if the call is allowed to pass from the ISP onto the congested open internet for carriage to the remote PBX or final destination. “Then all bets are off as far as quality of service goes,” Angl says. This is why the trend is to outsource any-to-any networks that use Multiprotocol Label Switching technology. MPLS can be used to create secure VPNs, but preserves class-of-service tagging. Calls between two company offices travel up into “the MPLS cloud” and back down again, with full QoS. The outsourcer manages the routing, and it’s a pay-for-use pricing model. “This is certainly the direction we’re seeing it going for organizations with multiple locations,” Angl says. SIP (session initiation protocol) trunking, another relatively new service offering, addresses a different but related set of problems. SIP trunks are a more economical way to purchase voice-grade IP connectivity to and over the WAN and at the same time avoid having to manage IP-TDM gateway infrastructure. A SIP trunk – a virtual channel over an existing broadband link and across the service provider’s IP network – carries a single voice call to the final destination in the case of intra-company calls, or passes out through a PSTN gateway, managed by the service provider, in others. Benefits? The service provider can ensure the lowest cost routing by carrying the call as far as possible over its IP network. Users have a little more flexibility in provisioning because they can add trunks one at a time rather than 23 at a time as with PRIs. And trunks preserve SIP signaling in transit. Virtually all IP PBX manufacturers now support SIP trunking and most network operators offer service. “But we’re a little way from seeing use of it become really prevalent,” Angl says. Outsourcing the complete shooting match by renting space on a remote, multi-tenant hosted IP PBX – as Sommex is doing – represents the final logical step in outsourcing telephony functions. Now almost everything is in the wide area domain. So is outsourcing WAN services and infrastructure for IP voice right for every company? Is it a panacea? Clearly not. “Outsourcing does make sense for some,” says Angl. Outsourcers are capable of meeting stringent performance and reliability requirements. In fact, they can sometimes provide a better calibre of service than smaller organizations could provide on their own, he says. But Info-Tech generally counsels clients to be skeptical about claims from outsourcing vendors that they offer a lower total cost of ownership (TCO). When TCO is properly calculated, with all factors taken into consideration, outsourcing and on-demand options often turn out to be more expensive, Angl cautions. Performance and reliability remain concerns as well. Sommex went through a period of several months of occasional sub-standard call quality – mostly echo on calls from its Three Rivers, Quebec location, especially to remoter parts of that province – until Radiant and its suppliers corrected routing problems. This can be covered in service level agreements (SLAs), of course – as it is in Sommex’s case. But much will depend on the provider’s customer service ethic and responsiveness – and if it’s a virtual network operator, Angl points out, its standing with suppliers. Companies may also lose, or feel that they have lost, some measure of control over the telephony function. Reporting from outsourcers is often not as detailed or as easily customizable as from on-premise systems. It almost goes without saying that security is also a consideration. “That’s part of the business requirements analysis: looking at all the risk factors,” Angl notes. However, Adrian Byram, executive vice president and chief technology officer at Radiant, notes that most small and mid-size organizations cannot afford the level of high-tech security in place at the data centres from which his company leases facilities, or the level of redundancy it builds into its network. That said, even Byram concedes that outsourcing may not make sense for every company. Radiant mainly targets organizations with from 50 to 1,000 employees and multiple locations. That often means retailers or manufacturers. Customers include Tim Horton’s, Sony Canada and First Ontario Credit Union. “If you’ve got 1,000 people sitting in one building, outsourcing doesn’t make much sense,” Byram says. “However, if, like a lot of retailers and distributors or even manufacturers, you have a lot of people spread across a lot of locations and a headquarters that is relatively small, outsourcing really makes sense.” “Ultimately,” Angl says, “it comes down to a business decision, to looking at your requirements and what your core competencies are and then making a decision.” The most likely candidates? Companies with high costs for internal long distance calling. Companies that want or need to be able to scale up or down quickly, even seasonally. Companies that lack the resources to manage on-premise telephony infrastructure or have made a strategic decision not to invest in such resources. Outsourcing doesn’t exactly make the decision about IP telephony a no-brainer, but at least, as Sommex’s Vesztergombi notes, it does provide a relatively easy way out. “For today and tomorrow at least, this is a good solution,” he says of the Radiant hosted PBX. “We’re happy with it. This is, right now, the semi-permanent solution.” Federation – The Final Frontier Today’s outsourced wide area networking solutions for IP telephony mainly address needs of companies with multiple offices. But what about calls from one company’s IP PBX – or virtual, hosted IP PBX – to a partner, customer or supplier also using VoIP? Wouldn’t it make sense, wouldn’t there be some benefit, to carrying those calls over IP networks end to end? Yes and yes. It’s called federation, and it can be done – is being done, transparently to users, in cases where a call goes between two subscribers to the same VoIP service. Least-cost routing is one obvious benefit, but in an age of rock-bottom long distance pricing, it’s probably not enough on its own. Federation in the context of unified communications, however, may be more interesting. What if employees at two partner organizations could see presence information for each other and securely send instant messages – plus reduce long distance costs? Radiant Communications, like some other IP services companies, is experimenting with offering hosted unified communications that makes this kind of functionality possible – in Radiant’s case, using Microsoft Corp’s Office Communications Server (OCS) platform. It has been using OCS in-house for about 18 months and talking to customers about the hosted service and its potential for federation with other users. But Adrian Byram, the company’s executive vice president and chief technology officer, candidly admits, “There’s not that much traction on that yet.” Jayanth Angl, a senior research analyst at Info-Tech Research Group Inc, calls federation, “ultimately the direction we’re going to go.” But Angl is also skeptical about how soon it will happen. Privacy and security concerns remain major impediments, he points out. Byram notes the analogy with fax. If there’s only one, it’s not very useful, but if everybody has one – or if everybody has an IP-based unified communications system – then it becomes very useful. “The adoption rate will crank up,” he says of federated communications solutions. “But it will likely be a five-year process.”

VoIP still scary for many enterprises

News | 09/21/2009 12:05 am EDT

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