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How To Decide If IP Telephony Is Right for Your Business
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Business New Haven
11/12/2001
By:
Fiona Phelan
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First came the telephone to keep us in touch with friends and family. Then came the computer that made our work easier. Next came the Internet that helped us communicate and conduct commerce globally (and keep in touch with friends and family). Now, there's Internet telephony that melds the three technologies together into a seamless infrastructure.
Internet protocol telephony (IP telephony) is today's alternative to the traditional circuit-switched telecommunications system supplied by your local phone company. With IP telephony you can route your phone calls, fax and voice-mail communications either through the Internet or an intranet for cost savings, or over the public switched telephone network for higher quality, according to industry leaders.
VoIP relies on software that transforms analog voice into digital packets. These digital packets are then sent over the Internet. When the packets arrive at the other end, they are reassembled and turned into an analog signal that the other person receives as your voice. The technology has evolved so that there is no delay in speech - Internet telephony used to be compared with using walkie-talkies - and most often the quality and clarity is undistinguishable from a traditional phone line.
Because voice traffic is routed over the Internet in packets that do not tie up a dedicated phone line, most PC-to-PC calls are free. Other types of calls such as PC-to-phone and phone-to-phone via the Internet do have charges but may not be as much as a traditional telephone service charges.
At home, you can turn your PC into a phone line by simply plugging a PC-compatible headset with microphone into your sound card. If you like to wander when you're on the phone there are also IP handset telephones that can be hooked up to the computer. However, unless you have DSL or a cable Internet connection, the sound quality through a modem connection may be poor because the modem speed cannot handle data packets to convert the information back to voice quickly enough, the experts say.
There are, however, numerous companies offering Internet telephony services for the consumer (just type in “Internet telephony” in your search engine). Some providers require software to be downloaded; others place a keypad on your browser. If your computer is not geared up to handle Internet telephony calls (because of modem speed) you can still take advantage of telephony answering services that take messages for you while you're on line - that way you'll never miss a call and if you use a single telephone line for both calls and the Internet your caller will also be able to leave a message.
According to market research, 35 percent of all calls will be placed using IP networks by next year - a potential $60 billion market. A year ago, researchers note, IP telephony networks accounted for a worldwide estimated 1.6 billion minutes of traffic per month.
By 2004, IP telephony is expected to account for 25 to 40 percent of all international voice traffic. Some in the industry are predicting that by 2010 all voice traffic will be over IP networks. There are more than 1,800 companies operating in the IP telephony market, most launched over just the last two years.
The growth and potential comes from the efficiency derived from a unified network for voice, data and video, say telecommunications specialists. Rather than installing one network for a phone system and another for computers and the World Wide Web, VoIP allows a business to install just one unified network to accommodate all of a company's communications needs. Additional benefits include easily upgradeable software and the ability to handle many more calls than a traditional phone system.
For businesses of any size there can be considerable cost-savings by using an IP phone system for long-distance calls. For instance, industry leaders note, many companies use home-based workers to handle customer-service responsibilities. If the home-based employee is connected to a central IP phone system then all long-distance charges are billed through the home office instead of individually at each employee's work site - and they are all billed at the same rate rather than many different rates charged by individual phone companies.
VoIP is really starting to come into its own in controlled network environments, such as a LAN. A small-office VoIP system can accept all standard incoming voice calls, convert them into digital packets and then pass the calls through a LAN, guaranteeing high voice quality.
Such systems, say industry leaders (speaking during interviews conducted over a VoIP system), can save a company thousands of dollars by doing without a private branch exchange (PBX). Also, by using an internal VoIP system, companies can include a variety of features such as call-forwarding and conference calling for free.
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