Should You Give VoIP a Chance ?

How small businesses can make sure IP telephony is right for them.




Patent-infringement suits, corporate collapses, service outages, and static-filled, near-incomprehensible Internet calls. They don't all happen at once, and their causes and cures all differ. Still, with so many such problems afflicting the VoIP business these days, it's only natural for small companies to ask a serious question: Is depending on IP telephony for all your voice communication needs a good idea?

The answer is of course that there's no easy answer. All you can do is sort through the concerns and ask questions to help decide whether VoIP's disadvantages outweigh its benefits in your particular case. Here are some of the concerns; the questions will come in the second installment of this article.

For years, the leading concern of small-business VoIP users was voice quality. Unlike large enterprises, small companies couldn't send their calls between branches or to the public phone network via big-bandwidth corporate IP networks. Similarly, they may not have been able to afford professional-grade VoIP services provided by larger operators such as AT&T, EarthLink and Global Crossing.

Such services typically give voice packets priority over data traffic, both on the broadband link to the customer's premises (which the operator usually provides as well) and on the provider's managed backbone network. As a result, small companies often had to make the hard choice between the hit-or-miss quality of Internet telephony and no VoIP at all.

Recently, however, concerns over service providers' staying power have threatened to overshadow any and all quality questions. Vonage started it off, when its loss to Verizon in a patent-infringement suit led to worries that it was going out of business. Then SunRocket, which had no such legal excuses for failure, collapsed all on its own. Stability anxiety even spilled over into the IP PBX (Private Branch eXchange) world. Observers wondered, for example, whether the patent suit and countersuit involving vendors Mitel and ShoreTel would raise further roadblocks to VoIP adoption.

Technical reliability used to get less attention, but recently, it has gotten plenty. The main reason: Skype's recent outage, which left users without service for a day or so. Other services have suffered lower-profile failures as well. A more subtle problem is the inherently lower reliability of the technology itself. As long as VoIP runs not on bulletproof telecom switches but rather on servers, as it usually does, it will have trouble approaching the fabled five-nines, or 99.999 percent, reliability of traditional phone networks.

Worries about emergency operation have typically focused more on residential than business customers. While the inability of a Vonage user to reach police by dialing 911 made headlines a couple of years ago, business VoIP users have had no such notorious incidents. That doesn't mean you shouldn't think about emergencies, though. For one thing, data networks and VoIP equipment need external power, so only battery backup will ensure that your IP phone service will work if a storm knocks out the electrical grid. But batteries will only last hours or days at most, and consequently, so will your VoIP service.

On the other hand, when the emergency is really big — a regional disaster, for instance — VoIP actually has some advantages. If some future Hurricane Katrina forces you to relocate your office, it will be relatively simple to have all your calls routed to a new physical or IP address, so you can be up and running with the samephone numbers in short order.

And that points to one factor that complicates all the others: There can be a significant downside to not going with VoIP, which small businesses have to weigh against all the other issues. Once you get used to features like Web-based call management or free calling between locations, for example, it's hard to imagine getting as much done without them. Avoiding VoIP because of quality or reliability concerns could, in fact, make you fall behind your competitors and your own goals.

Added up, then, it's clear that you need to ask a lot of questions about VoIP before you decide whether it is right for you.


Thank : voip-news.com