Hosted VoIP Can Improve Telephone Reliability

Many mid-size and even large companies insist on maintaining their own in-house telephone systems in the belief that it’s the only way to ensure reliable communications. Is this really true, or just one of those long held beliefs that need to be re-examined?

There’s been a major game changer introduced into the telephone services industry recently. It’s the rise of hosted PBX or HPBX. You’ll also hear it called hosted VoIP or communications in the cloud. Like everything else “in the cloud,” this is truly a revolution in technology. In a decade or two, we’ll look back and wonder why we didn’t always do it this way.

“Cloud, schmoud,” you say? I can see how you might feel that way, especially if you’ve been burned by a poor implementation of VoIP technology. VoIP isn’t a particular product or even standardized methodology. It’s a general class of voice communication based on packet switched network technology. VoIP runs the gamut from software running on a laptop computer at the coffee shop, to dongles that let you plug your telephone into a PC, to broadband phone that shares an Internet connection, all the way up to enterprise and even carrier level solutions that are indistinguishable from traditional phone systems to the caller.

What successful enterprise implementers of VoIP telephony know that others don’t realize is that you need a carefully engineered network from the telephone handset to the service provider to protect fragile voice packets from being crushed by more numerous and robust data packets. In most cases, that means stay off the Internet except when you absolutely have to in order to include a remote worker or someone traveling. One reason is that the Internet does not support Class of Service controls to ensure the integrity of voice packets. Other parameters, such as bandwidth, latency, jitter, packet loss and out of sequence packet arrivals are uncontrollable on the public Internet. All of these are readily managed on private lines, MPLS networks and SIP trunks.

With the connectivity issue solved, there is still the issue of reliability. Won’t an in-house hardware solution that’s been proven over years of operation be inherently more reliable than “something out there, somewhere?” Not when you realize that the “something” you are referring to is the latest high quality servers set up for redundant protection with multiple levels of backup power and complete environmental controls. Like everything else in the cloud, there is a lot of virtualization involved so that resources are available in depth and instantly scalable.

The hosted solutions provider absolutely must provide high quality service or they’ll go out of business. After all, this is either a major part of their business or all of it. They almost always have technical staff on duty 24/7 and keep up with maintenance activities. How about at your company?

This is where the superiority of in-house PBX starts to become suspect. First of all, is your system really that rock solid? Parts never fail? The power never glitches or goes completely off? You may have duplicated the security, environmental control and power backup of a SAS 70 Type II data center, especially if you need this facility for your IT equipment. On the other hand, if your PBX is simply sitting in a “telephone closet” or maintenance room where the phone and data lines come in, you may not be all that well protected against disasters.

How about the age of that machine? We know that computers go obsolete almost before they are unboxed. PBX phone systems aren’t quite that bad, but they do start to degrade as the years go by. At some point, it’s hard to find replacement parts or even someone knowledgeable to maintain the system and make repairs. New features are introduced into the telephony marketplace, but you can’t take advantage of them. Your system is just a bit too old to be upgraded. This is how obsolescence begins. Pretty soon, you’re patching together a dinosaur that should have been hit by a meteor years ago.

It is being recognized that hosted VoIP solutions can be as reliable and even more reliable than in-housed PBX telephone systems. You need to pick a quality supplier and install highly reliable network connections to gain the benefits of high reliability in the cloud. If you do that correctly, you’ll enjoy reliable communications, access to the latest productivity features, integration with mobile devices, and the cost savings of paying by the month only for what you need.

Has this discussion piqued your interest on how hosted solutions might be a better choice than what you have now? If so, get pricing and features for Hosted VoIP solutions that meet your particular requirements. See if you can’t get more value for the same or less cost than your current business telephone system.

SIP Trunks vs ISDN PRI

Enterprise telephony long ago advanced beyond analog business lines in favor of PBX telephone systems and ISDN PRI trunking. Now there’s another option that may offer cost and performance advantages for companies that want to improve their voice services. It’s called SIP Trunking. Let’s compare and contrast SIP Trunks with ISDN PRI to see how to choose between them.

You should know that we are still talking exclusively about digital telephony. There is no analog transport in either a SIP Trunk or PRI. What differentiates the two is that ISDN PRI is based on a switched circuit model and SIP Trunking is based on packet switching.

For many companies it could be six of one and a half-dozen of the other. That’s because either trunking service can be made to work with your in-house phone system. The idea behind digital trunking is to carry a half-dozen or more outside phone lines on a single digital line. Usually that’s one or more T1 lines, although DS3, OC3 fiber or Ethernet can also be used.

ISDN PRI uses a T1 line configured into 23 separate voice channels plus one data and control channel. Most PBX systems and the newer IP PBX phone systems make it easy to connect to ISDN PRI. They either offer one or more PRI ports built-in or accommodate a plug-in adaptor card.

If you need more than 23 lines, you simply add more ISDN PRI lines incrementally. Each additional line can bring in up to 23 more business phone lines. You’ll have to check what’s available for your phone system, but it is not uncommon to have 2 to 4 PRI lines plugged into a PBX system.

The technology used for ISDN PRI is defined by the Integrated Systems Digital Network specification. PRI is the Primary Rate Interface. There is also a lower performance BRI or Basic Rate Interface that isn’t seen much anymore. This is a legacy telephone technology designed to support the idea of separate digitized telephone lines, one per channel. There’s no chance of interference between calls because the channels are strictly defined and timed using Time Division Multiplexing.

SIP Trunking is more of a network than a telephone based technology. It is a packet switched network line, much like you would use to connect two business locations. What SIP Trunking can do is directly support a converged voice and data network. You can run SIP Trunks between business locations to expand your voice and data network geographically.

The SIP in SIP Trunking stands for Session Initiation Protocol. That’s the switching technology used in VoIP telephone systems. In SIP trunking the control signals for the phone system are transported in packets that travel down the same network pipe as the voice packets.

ISDN PRI isn’t so much about convergence. It’s really about having separate telephone and data lines leave the premises, although you are free to converge your in-house network and let an IP PBX system on the network handle call routing, including outside calls on the ISDN PRI trunk line.

SIP Trunking doesn’t have to be about convergence, either. You can simply use a SIP Trunk to connect your PBX system to a telephone service provider rather than using an ISDN PRI. Depending on which CODEC or coding scheme you use, you may be able to handle more than 23 lines on a SIP Trunk. If you are using an Ethernet connection to your provider, you may be able to support dozens of phone lines depending on the bandwidth available.

For small businesses, SIP Trunks can be configured to transport both voice and data to your service provider. Most often this is used to bring in telephone lines and broadband Internet service on the same SIP Trunk. There’s a cost advantage, even if you are not running a converged voice and data in-house.

Since either ISDN PRI or SIP Trunking might be able to support your needs, how do you choose? That depends on the features you desire and what’s available to serve your particular business location. You may have several options to choose from. To find out, check out SIP Trunks and ISDN PRI availability and pricing now.

Cloud Networking Services Extend Business Footprint

If you have a single office in a single city, you may have need for cloud computing or hosted PBX, aka telephony in the cloud. But chances are your communications needs are more about connecting to a service provider’s cloud than requiring a cloud of your own. It’s quite different for companies with multiple business locations. Cloud networking services are just what you need to interconnect two or more locations so they can act as one.

What is cloud networking? It is the use of public or private networks that connect geographically diverse sites on a one to one, one to many or many to many basis. The Internet is a cloud. So are privately run MPLS networks and their Frame Relay predecessors. You can even create your own cloud, if you like. You do this by leasing dedicated lines between locations and setting up your own routing scheme to determine how locations may communicate.

In fact, the ad-hoc private network is how many growing businesses get started with multi-location connections. They start off with a T1 point to point data line that connects their main office to a branch site. As more offices or retail locations are added, more lines are connected. At some point, you are dealing with a spider’s web of private lines that need constant management and are costing a small fortune.

This is where cloud networks shine. The idea behind the cloud is that costs are amortized by users sharing the resources of the cloud. Each user is required to provide a connection from each of their desired locations to the cloud network. The connections between locations and the transport of voice, data or video through the shared portion of the network is the responsibility of the cloud. The name “cloud” comes from the convention of drawing this shared network in the shape of a cumulus cloud. It signifies that you don’t manage what goes on in there. That’s someone else’s job.

Actually, you do need to be concerned about what’s going on in that cloud even though you don’t directly operate or control it. You don’t want your valuable information damaged or intercepted during the transport process. Take the biggest cloud in the world, the Internet. It has the advantages of being near universally available and relatively cheap to use. But the Internet also has the disadvantages of being a “best effort” service with no guaranteed performance parameters and enough security concerns to give you pause. How can anyone use the Internet for serious business applications?

In some cases you can’t. Two-way real-time applications have a tough time with the unpredictable performance that is inherent in the design of the Internet cloud. But it still works just fine for Web access, email, small scale data backup to remote servers, and one-way video that is properly buffered. In fact, your business probably needs access to the Internet just to communicate with customers, place orders or do research. If you are going to send sensitive business data between locations using the Internet cloud, however, you’ll need to protect yourself by encrypting those packets so they can’t be read by unintended parties. That process is called tunneling. The overall connection is called IP VPN. VPN, meaning Virtual Private Network.

If the internet is too flakey or scary to support your business, the cloud you’ll be most interested in is called MPLS or Multi-Protocol Label Switching. This is a privately run network with a regional or nationwide footprint. The combination of private ownership and proprietary technology means that performance can be guaranteed and security is inherently better than the public Internet. That’s why MPLS networks are also called MPLS VPN networks, even without packet encryption. Of course you can still encrypt your data to add even more security... something of a belt and suspenders approach.

A specialized type of cloud networking is telephone service. Instead of hooking all your phones with individual lines to the local phone company or managing an in-house PBX system, you connect your phones to the cloud using SIP trunks. This is also called hosted PBX. Users that all connect to the same cloud may communicate over this private network. When you need to make or receive calls with the general public, those calls are connected to the public telephone network by the service provider.

Can your company benefit from cloud networking or better cloud services? It’s fast and easy to find out. Just take a second and put in an inquiry for availability and pricing of competitive cloud networking services.