TechNO Expo

Growing Pains

When businesses began to choose VOIP and voice and data technologies collided, voice and data personnel started to work together, which was fraught with challenges: Who would be responsible for upgrade decisions? How will duties be divided? Will jobs be eliminated in the merging? This was yet another, unexpected obstacle to VOIP adoption.

I refer to this time of transition in the VOIP adoption cycle as the period of disconnect. The IT and telecom departments had to sort out their technology, responsibility, management, and budget differences. The adoption of VOIP was universally understood as expensive and risky. With the stakes high, adoption rates remained low.

However, early adopters started to install enterprise VOIP systems. Some were complete IP systems. Others were hybrids that combined IP and TDM elements. The hybrid retained some of value of the enterprises’ previous investment. As new systems were installed between 2001 and 2005, bugs became apparent, and vendors revised their products to address the issues.

One problem that arose was quality of service in the public switched telephone network (PSTN). While it was possible to control quality of service when leaving the walls of the enterprise, to do so required dedicated circuits. These options were viable but expensive. The PSTN providers responded with a technology called multi protocol label switching (MPLS). Generally, MPLS offered a way to move the enterprise data outside the building to multiple locations inexpensively while controlling packet prioritization. (It’s necessary to move voice packets first because a phone call cannot tolerate out-of-sequence or “late” packets.) According to Marc Agar, president of CA Communica-tions in Wayzata, MPLS began to be widely available and affordable to the medium-sized business in late 2005 and early 2006.

Reaching Maturity

Today we have VOIP telephony systems being installed regularly. Com-munications-based applications are driving sales. Business unit managers, under pressure to reduce operating costs, are often VOIP initiators.

The drive to VOIP now seems to have two phases. In phase one, the enterprise moves to flatten the network that will carry both voice and data. The bulk of the spending occurs during this phase.