Voice over Internet Protocol Phone Services

Voice or Internet Protocol or VoIP appears destined to replace traditional wireline telephone services such as POTS (Plain Old Telephone Services) and even ISDN PRI digital trunks. What’s behind this shift in technology and what’s the key to maintaining voice quality with a new type of phone service.

The fundamental shift in technology can really be boiled down to a move toward computer networks and away from telephone networks. Also in the mix is the inclusion of wireless voice and data services that add another layer of complication.

Telephone networks started with Alexander Graham Bell and remained largely analog for most their century of dominance. Back when everyone had a telephone line and nobody knew what broadband meant, there was an effort to get the telephone system to do double duty as a means of voice communication and also computer communication via analog modems. This quickly hit its technical limit because the telephone network was designed for the human voice, which has a very low bandwidth requirement.

There was an effort to move to digital phone lines, called ISDN, but it was too little too late. Cable and DSL broadband offered much higher speeds at lower cost. Businesses ordered T1 and T3 lines, originally developed for digitizing phone lines and bundling them to save transmission costs between telco offices. These digital lines work just fine as point to point or dedicated Internet connections for data transmission. In fact, they’re still the most popular connectivity for small and medium businesses because of plunging prices and high reliability.

VoIP came out of the computer, not telephone, world. The IP stands for Internet Protocol, the most popular networking standard. Yes, it does say Internet protocol, but that doesn’t mean it is limited to the Internet. In fact, the Internet would have probably stayed an obscure academic network had it not been for the development of Ethernet as a way to connect computers and their peripherals.

The difference between telephone networks and computer networks is the difference between switched circuit networks and packet switched networks. Switched circuit networks, like the telephone network, actually switch connections to set up a private path for each phone call. This is bit like switching electrical circuits to power something as long as you need to use it. Packet switched networks are more like the US Mail. The network provides hard pathways to every destination. Each letter or packet gets where it is going by looking at the address for that individual packet and routing it accordingly.

VoIP is simply a way to send a set of packets in real time that are digitized pieces of a telephone conversation. Put them together end to end and the voice from the distant location is recreated. When it works well it sounds just like a telephone call, although you can also use a computer for two way conversations if it has a microphone and loudspeakers or earbuds.

Just like computers have struggled to press the century old telephone system into service for carrying data packets, computer networks have struggled with carrying sensitive voice packets on a system designed to reliably transfer data files even if parts had to be resent due to network errors. When VoIP goes bad, it sounds garbled and clips each side of the conversation. That’s a symptom of a network that isn’t optimized for real time voice packets that have to get through without error, jitter and time delay (latency).

The Internet is hit and miss when it comes to carrying VoIP telephony. If you have sufficient bandwidth and little congestion, you can experience a decent quality call. That’s especially true if cell phone call quality is what you are comparing to. If the Internet is having problems or getting congested, you may come to miss your old faithful landline.

Businesses that require optimal voice quality don’t use the Internet as their phone connection. Instead, they use private lines or MPLS networks that are engineered to support packet voice signals. You may hear this referred to as enterprise voice or enterprise VoIP, even though there is no Internet involved with the Internet protocol in this case.

Are you considering a move to VoIP with your next business telephone system upgrade? If so, be sure to understand the costs and tradeoffs with Internet vs non-Internet implementations. You can get that help along with pricing and availability for Enterprise VoIP telephony at no cost or obligation for serious business applications.

Where Hosted PBX Solutions Save

Business telephone systems range from the very simple with a few phones and a few lines to complex private branch exchanges that support multiple sites. The new approach is a hosted PBX that makes things simple again. But do hosted PBX solutions really save anything and can they maintain voice quality?

With the simplest arrangement of a single landline phone connected to the local phone company, there really isn’t much to manage. You pay so much per month for “dial tone” that makes your phone work and gives you typically unlimited local calling. You have the option to switch to a different provider for long distance service or use a dial-around service for international calling. These are options to save you on the per minute calling rates.

The basic analog or POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) phone service seems simple because all the complexity is at the other end of the wire. What you don’t see or have to deal with is the intricacies of connecting your line to any of billions worldwide or to even more billions of wireless callers. If you have, say, 3 business locations with 1 phone each, they talk to each other by dialing up the desired location just like any other phone number.

Businesses found out just how complex the PSTN (Public Switched Telephone Network) was when they got big enough to have lots of desk phones and a dozen or more outside lines. What many companies did was to buy their own telephone switching system called a PBX (Private Branch Exchange.) The advantage of having your own PBX system is that calls within the company stay on your own wiring and you don’t have to pay the telephone company to connect them. That includes more complex PBX arrangements with digital tie lines that connect multiple locations in a private network. Once again, the motivation is to keep as many calls as possible off the public network to avoid “toll” charges.

Many companies have rued the day the got into the telephone business. PBX systems are expensive to buy and need constant updates as employees move within the company. There is also maintenance activity for both the PBX and its telephone network wiring.

Hosted PBX is a fairly new service that offers to offload the expense of in-house phone systems. It only became possible when most companies installed Local Area Networks for their computers and the price of private digital lines became affordable. The enabling technology is VoIP or Voice over Internet Protocol. In this case, Internet refers to the technology standard and not necessarily use of the public Internet.

Hosted PBX refers to using a large PBX telephone system that is located or hosted by a third-party service provider. This PBX is big enough to handle the telephone traffic of many different companies to gain an economy of scale. In a way, this is similar to going back to the days where each phone was individually connected to a local telephone company that took care of call switching.

So, where does the cost savings come from? Network consolidation is one area. Both telephones and computers run on a single converged voice and data network. There are no separate telephone wires. This network is extended to the hosted PBX provider using a private digital line called a SIP trunk. You are not tied to a particular service provider. There are many competing hosted PBX solutions and that competition is another way that cost savings can be offered.

The private SIP trunk helps to maintain high voice quality because it provides the characteristics of low latency, jitter, packet loss and congestion, along with quality of service mechanisms that keep data packets from interfering with voice packets. You can also buy Internet based hosted PBX services at lower costs, but the vagaries of the public Internet can introduce distortion and clipping in the conversations.

Do hosted PBX solutions offer a real cost savings for your company? It depends on how many seats you have, what features you want and what your existing system is costing you. If you are close to replacing an aging PBX or one that has run out of capacity, the economics highly favor hosted solutions. To decide for yourself, get competitive pricing on hosted PBX solutions for business. It may come down to whether you want to pay as you go versus investing in your own in-house phone system.

Types of Business Telephone Lines

Business telephone lines, once available in only a single analog version, have proliferated over the years. You can still get the legacy analog subscriber loop. You can also get a variety of digital lines and trunks that may offer cost and performance advantages.

The basic business telephone line is little changed from its invention over a century ago. It consists of a single small gauge twisted pair copper wires that carry all the necessary signals. This is an analog telephone line. Analog phone service is also known as POTS for Plain Old Telephone Service. Many businesses have multi-line phones, but all they do is connect to multiple POTS lines. One to four lines is typical of a small office phone system. If there are lighted pushbuttons for each outside line, this may be called a “key” telephone system.

POTS telephone lines generally include local and long distance calling, features such as Caller ID, 3 way calling, and perhaps a toll free number. One POTS line may be connected full time to an office FAX machine. Some companies that have digital telephone systems may still keep a POTS line for the FAX machine, as not all digital services support FAX.

The simplest digital phone line is a single VoIP or broadband phone service that uses the Internet as a substitute for the twisted pair analog phone line. The cost savings realized is due to the fact that most businesses need broadband Internet access as well as telephone service. Using the Internet to connect the phone to the service provider avoids the charges for a separate telephone line.

The main limitation to broadband phone service is that the Internet was never designed to support high quality two-way real time voice or video services. It is critical to have enough bandwidth to support all the voice and data traffic on the broadband connection and to give voice packets priority. When bandwidth becomes restricted, voice quality starts to get garbled and the call may even be dropped. Another factor is latency or time delay between source and destination. The longer the latency, the more the phone starts to act like a two-way radio where only one person can talk at a time. Latency is seldom, if ever, a factor on analog lines or carefully engineered private networks.

Enterprise VoIP systems, consisting of many telephone sets connected to a converged voice and data LAN, avoid the limitations of the Internet by using dedicated circuits transport calls between internal phones and to the connection point or termination with the Public Switched Telephone Network. That termination may be within the company, where the connection is to multiple POTS lines or a digital trunk line. It may also be at a service provider connected to the enterprise by a converged voice and data line called a SIP Trunk.

A “trunk” line is simply a bundling of multiple telephone lines in one cable. That may be a fat cable with many analog copper pair or it can be a digital trunk line with few wires that transport many telephone calls in channels or packet streams.

The most popular digital trunk line is called ISDN PRI. This is also called T1 PRI because it is carried on a T1 digital line. What a PRI digital trunk gives you are up to 23 outside telephone lines plus a dedicated channel for switching signals and data such as Caller ID. Some PBX telephone systems have provisions to connect to two or more PRI trunks. This is especially true for call centers and large corporate office buildings. Note that each of the business lines in the ISDN PRI trunk can be configured as local, long distance, inbound only, outbound only, toll free or some combination of these per customer requirements.

The newest business telephone trunk is called SIP Trunking. SIP is the control and signaling protocol for VoIP telephone systems. One SIP trunk can carry dozens of phone calls, even more than a PRI trunk. The other way SIP trunks can be configured is for both voice and data on the same line. This is especially valuable for companies that have converged networks shared by both computers and telephones. The SIP services provider brings in both broadband Internet access plus business telephone lines on the same SIP trunk.

What type of service will work best for your company? There may be a range of options to choose from. Get prices and availability for business telephone service now, so you have up to date information to make an informed purchasing decision.