Glen,
I am now a user of VoIP - against my will, it was a corporate
decision...it's not dead but it damn well should be. Shot and buried at
midnight in an umarked grave is my vote.
One of the IT industry's worst habits is to pitch emerging technologies on
the basis of "buy now, we'll make it work sometime". This is what's happened
with commercial-grade VoIP.
Experience:
1) Too many simultaneous attempts to dial-out, and the servers can't handle
the call setup load. Result: existing calls start experiencing strange
artefacts.
2) Call quality is unpredictable at best. At worst, it's like using a
mobile, driving through a tunnel, with a broken echo-canceller, and having a
satellite link in the conversation all at once.
3) Despite repeated claims to the contrary by VoIP vendors, the feature set
has fallen short of the aging PBX.
For eg: there aren't enough call groups, so people can't answer each others'
phones.
For eg: the music-on-hold was only introduced a couple of months ago, is
still version 1.0 and is flaky.
For eg: some functions have migrated back to the administrator, so I can't
set the number of rings before a divert (that's now an admin function).
For eg: the UI adds unnecessary steps to an operation like call transfer.
For eg: the new system only holds some settings for 24 hours, don't know
why.
4) No price comparison factors in the matter of skills. PBXs had deskilled
many normal operations - ie, they were designed to be sold with a minimum of
knowledge and personnel at the installation end. Once the cables are pulled
and the PBX is plugged in, configuration was a one-person job.
OTOH, the VoIP system has needed an NT+SQL Server expert, a telephony
expert, a router expert, and some weeks of installation, implementation,
tuning, complaining, promises, and "it will get better when we upgrade the
routers".
Calls are cheaper, yes. About 1/2 of the phone bill now pays for people
saying "what"? at each other. In short, the VoIP industry needs to go back
and try again.
Richard Chirgwin
-----Original Message-----
From: Glen Turner [mailto:glen.turner@aarnet.edu.au]
Sent: Thursday, 2 August 2001 11:13
To: Anthony Healy
Cc: Link List
Subject: Re: [LINK] Foolish Grant
Anthony Healy wrote:
>
> The grant is for commercialising emerging technology, yet Voice over IP
> emerged some time ago, and died. Ozemail was doing this in 1995, with one
of
> the directors of this company in fact.
I'm not sure in what whay you think Voice over IP is dead.
If you do the sums for a greenfields site VoIP is now cheaper
than a traditional corporate PBX. That's without counting
the reduction in voice+data cabling.
If you need to upgrade you PBX from one software version to
the next, replacing the PBX with VoIP seems to be a break-even
exercise. Obviously, PBX manufacturers will come under
some pressure to lower their software charges.
In the US, VoIP is popular with banks and other institutions
with many branches as it allows the installation of just
one WAN link for their SNA, PC and voice traffic. The Cisco
3600 series of routers is aimed at this branch-office market.
Ericcson don't expect their traditional PBX, the MD110, to be
competitive in the future and have announced the end of life
for the architecture after one more major software release.
That's the *architecture*, not just the MD110 product.
In short, VoIP will be the corporate telephony standard
in under five years. I doubt it will have much home
pentration until the Customer Access Network is replaced.
Even then you'd probably see analogue handsets running to
a set-top box which also contains TV and Ethernet connectors.
I've no idea what the company mentioned in doing, as I've
never had contact with them. There are already some very
good Australian companies developing VoIP software
(Equivalence Pty Ltd springs to mind) so hopefully the company
mentioned had to beat some seriously good competition to
get the grant.
Glen
-- Glen Turner Network Engineer (08) 8303 3936 Australian Academic and Research Network glen.turner@aarnet.edu.au http://www.aarnet.edu.au/ -- The revolution will not be televised, it will be digitised
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