Voip.org

Today millions of people and companies recognise the advantages and benefits of utilising VoIP as the right communications medium for their needs business or otherwise.

But it wasn’t always like this.

At the time that VoIP appeared it faced some very large challenges to its growth. Fast internet services were not yet available, a basic fundamental building block for VoIP. Dial-Up internet connections were used (remember them?) which were so poor that calls (and lines) often dropped and voice quality was still very much impaired.

Another challenging factor was loss of service during power failure. No power meant no internet connection and therefore no VoIP service. Traditional POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) systems didn’t suffer from this problem as power was delivered down the line. Lastly, remember paying for the internet call set-up, then paying also per minute of internet use and paying per amount of data downloaded/uploaded as well?

Then came broadband technology and voice quality shot up, reliability shot up and people began to consider using VoIP as a serious alternative for their communications.

VOIP Today

VoIP today brings feature rich technology, business benefits, cost savings and the ability to control your communications services on a level never before seen. Online point-and-click services subscriptions, fingertip management of user/employees access to services, ability to monitor and respond to cost control per call, destination or country are all powerful tools brought down to the individual user level.

VoIP has matured enough to compete with PBX's and other services on every platform.

Wireless VoIP allows employees, workers and other users to stay in continuous contact wherever they are, as long as there is an internet connection. Mobile workers, decentralised and virtual teams all benefit from the freedom VoIP provides. VoIP is more cost effective than mobile phones and more effective than pagers previously used for the same purposes.

Businesses can replace expensive and obsolete phone services to equip themselves and their staff with a technology which is better, inexpensive (therefore saves OPEX) and is continually offering new services & features.

Issues Today

VoIP does have its own set of unique problems though. Power failure is still a major cause of concern. Some SP's manage their systems with power backups that can provide supply without interruption. Others temporarily route services to the PSTN, although costly, it does however invoke customer confidence in the SP and provides dependability to the customers business.

Service interruptions are common depending on where and how the SP's interconnect and route their traffic. Oftentimes it is this "middleman" that has outage problems due to hardware/software failure or unprotected redundancy architecture but it is the SP's that attract the business impact of the complaints from their customers.

Not all SP's are compliant with Emergency Services calls or the services that are implemented are not entirely reliable. SP's are still struggling with the question of Lawful Intercept and being able to identify where exactly calls originate from as well as the true identity of the user.

Breaking down traditional concepts

Despite the challenges facing it, VOIP is emerging as a serious threat to traditional telecoms providers. Telcos cannot compete with the call rates and services offered by VOIP. Landlines are still expensive and more and more businesses are looking to cost-cut their communications needs as well as simplify them by implementing business-friendly converged communications tools (UC & FMC for example)

VOIP is here to stay and traditional telecoms providers will need to find a symbiotic way of co-existing with its flashier, adaptive and flexible cousin.

It may not be too far off in the future before we see a shift in paradigm by these companies from offering telephony services to offering only infrastructure & access services that accommodates the demand for a growing, hungry VOIP-based community.