Voice over IP (VoIP)—the use of IP for voice communications—is quickly becoming the technology that businesses are using to connect their telephone systems. One important reason for this trend is that most business phone manufacturers are freezing further development of the Time Division Multiplexing (TDM) technology that traditional phone systems use. (TDM is a method of separating a signal into many small segments at the sending end, transmitting the pieces separately, and reassembling them at the receiving end.) Manufacturers such as Avaya, Mitel Networks, NEC, Nortel Networks, and Siemens are creating migration strategies to help their customers move from TDM to VoIP. At the same time, these manufacturers aren't significantly upgrading their traditional TDM architectures, thus increasing demand for VoIP by companies that want new or upgraded service.
For any business with significant telephony needs, VoIP systems can offer a multitude of advantages. When you're deciding whether to implement VoIP, you should keep in mind not only the advantages but also the considerations associated with VoIP. You should also be aware of the various types of VoIP solutions available.
VoIP Advantages
VoIP can offer many advantages to companies that rely on the phone to interact with their customers. The advantages include the following:
- When companies implement a VoIP system, they can use Automatic Number Identification. ANI provides the receiver of a call with the phone number of the person who is calling. Companies can use ANI to route calls to multiple call centers. For example, a company might use ANI to identify calls from its largest customers so that it can route those calls directly to the top salespeople while routing all other calls to an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system.
- A VoIP system can facilitate video over IP. Videoconferencing has been a hard sell through traditional broadband methods, but it's a more viable option with VoIP.
- VoIP can simplify wiring in new construction. Theoretically, one wiring network can handle both voice and data, thus expediting the wiring of a new phone system.
- When used with a private network, VoIP systems can significantly reduce the costs associated with employees placing calls between offices and with the internal routing of outside calls that enter the private network.
- VoIP can reduce costs associated with moving and reprogramming employees' phones when they move to a new office or cubicle. The cost to move and reprogram a TDM phone can run from $70 to $100. VoIP phones eliminate those charges—typically, employees can simply unplug their VoIP phones from their old location and plug them in at their new location.
VoIP Considerations
To ensure a successful VoIP system implementation, you need to keep in mind several considerations. First and foremost, VoIP isn't a telephony cure-all. Routing voice communication over the public Internet through an ordinary ISP usually isn't a workable business solution. When you route calls over the Internet, problems such as latency and jitter often seriously degrade call quality. For companies that rely on customers calling in, routing calls over the Internet is far from ready for prime time.
Instead of using the Internet, many companies set up private networks in which they own the bandwidth. These companies can prioritize voice traffic over data traffic, which lets the VoIP system transmit voice packets effectively, with no perceptible degradation in quality.