Voice over IP A Discussion of Business and IT Challenges

The Infrastructure Challenge

Unlike traditional telephone systems, an IP telephony system comprised of multiple components. IP telephony vendors often treat this as an advantage over traditional PBXs. Their argument is that the new system is modular and scalable. Although it is true that modularity makes it scalable, it typically translates to purchasing of multiple redundant components. A successful call in IP telephony systems requires each component to be available and functioning properly. For small and medium-size companies this means that their IT teams will most likely have to manage more components than a traditional single-box PBX system. Traditional PBXs have little changed from when they were first brought into the enterprise markets and where they are today. Although there have been very few additions to functionality of traditional voice systems, they have become extremely reliable. As a matter of fact, the availability and quality of a phone system is often taken for granted. Large organizations who are looking into IP telephony as a means of reducing telecommunications costs must evaluate their data network infrastructure and its IT team’s skillsets. Traditionally, end-users are more tolerant towards data network unavailability than voice system unavailability. As companies combine their voice and data traffic on to the same network, the availability of their telephone systems will be directly dependant on the availability of their data network resources. Driven by new VoIP technologies and the need to reduce network costs, many enterprises are now designing new converged networks capable of handling both voice and data. The key challenge is to reconcile the performance requirements of voice with the unpredictable nature of data on a single network. The motivation for running VoIP networks is to eliminate the expense of maintaining separate voice and data networks. It sounds easy enough to run voice over IP network – just encapsulate digitized voice in IP packets and go. Digitizing and “packetizing” voice is fairly straightforward, but there’s one other key issue that is much tougher to deal with. The key challenge in building converged networks is performance. Voice communications has much more stringent performance requirements than data communications.