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All Roads Lead to IP
TO CONSUMERS, IP telephony means making cheap
long-distance phone calls over the Internet. But for
corporate America, the convergence of voice, video
and data on a single IP network is much more. It’s a
dramatic new way of thinking about, and managing, communications,
with voice traffic acting like any other packet on the
network and telephones acting as just another network client.
Converged IP networks allow for
a wide variety of new applications
to ride on the network and interact,
including IP telephony, audioconferencing,
videoconferencing, unified
messaging and presence technologies
(like chat).
Getting Started
Corporate America is just starting
down the road to voice-over-IP
(VoIP) communications, though
every analyst says it’s just a matter
of time before it becomes mainstream.
“By 2009, the installed base
of IP [communications] equipment
will dominate the enterprise landscape,
but that’s still a few years
away,” says Robert Rosenberg, president
of Insight Research Corp. in
Boonton, N.J.
There are several reasons why
VoIP hasn’t been an overnight success.
Companies started testing the
waters of VoIP in 2001, but there
were serious concerns about voice
sound quality that slowed the momentum
(those concerns have been
largely resolved). Moreover, one of
the key reasons for implementing
VoIP was to reduce the long-distance
charges associated with the traditional
phone networks, yet those
charges have dropped so low that
those cost savings are less dramatic.
The cost of IP phones is another
reason for the slow pace. “The cost
of going VoIP is certainly a factor
here, since the price of newer IP
phones will continue to be about
25% higher than the [traditional] alternative,”
Rosenberg says.
“VoIP never was and never will be
the least expensive way to deliver
voice to the enterprise, but the allure
of VoIP’s rich applications like
video telephony will slowly convert
legacy customers,” he adds.
Indeed, there are a variety of reasons
for moving to a converged IP
network. Users report benefits such
as the following:
■ Much lower costs for audioconferencing.
■ The ease of moving, adding
and changing phones.
■ The fact that the IT staff can
manage a single network infrastructure
out of the data center, instead of
two or more very different networks.
Thumbs Up
Early users are giving a thumbs up
to converged networks, saying their
technology choices have saved money
and made their voice communications
setups more flexible. Some
implement pure VoIP systems, while
others rely on a hybrid of IP and circuit-
switched technologies. Either
way, the users say they’re realizing
greater efficiencies just by starting
to merge their voice and data networks.
IBM, for example, is rolling out a
global VoIP network over the next
five years that’s expected to cut
voice/data communications costs by
25%, according to Fred Spuleck, director
of global voice infrastructure
at IBM. One efficiency will come
from lowering the number of IBM’s
private branch exchange (PBX)
switches from the current count of
about 900 to just 11 IP-based PBXs,
Spuleck says.
Pure VoIP supporters say their
systems are more resilient and can
more easily support video or voice
conferencing as well as new data applications.
For example, IBM’s new
VoIP network will allow easy creation
of an audioconferencing system
that will cut the company’s annual
costs for that capability in half,
Spuleck says. A VoIP project at
SouthTrust Bank in Birmingham,
Ala., will save $1 million annually on
conference calling alone and “several
million dollars” overall, says Stanley
Adams, the bank’s group vice
president of network services.
On the other hand, users of hybrid
systems say they want to hold on to
the value of large investments in
time division mulitiplexing (TDM)
switches, and they suggest that a hybrid
network would provide a backup
if a major virus or other security
incident affected their data networks.
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