Should you move to a Voice over IP phone system?
Voice over IP, or Internet phones, are finally going mainstream. Should your agency think about switching to VOIP?
By Gillian Kerr, RealWorld Systems
The information in this article is current as of November 2, 2004.
Telephone systems, as I've often said in these columns, are the most important communication technologies in our daily lives. They are so integrated into our work and relationships that we don't even think of them as being 'information technology'. Yet our phone systems keep getting more complex and functional (look at how mobile phones and voice mail have changed our lives) and there are more big changes on the horizon. The biggest transformation in the next five years or so will involve Voice over Internet Protocol, or VOIP.
VOIP sends spoken conversation over the Internet instead of over regular phone lines. Several instant messaging clients like MSN Messenger and Yahoo Messenger offer VOIP for computer-to-computer conversations, in which people talk to each other through computer headsets. VOIP has had a bad reputation because of often-poor audio quality, but it's finally improved to the point where major corporations are switching away from Plain Old Telephone Service (often called POTS) to VOIP. And you don't need a computer to use it anymore; you can buy IP phones that plug into your Internet connection just like your regular phone plugs into the phone jack.
With the new VOIP services, agencies can:
- Get rid of their current phone systems entirely, and replace them with Internet-based phones that use their broadband Internet connection. Or add Internet-based phone services to their existing system for telecommuters, offsite locations and project staff.
- Eliminate long distance charges for staff who work in different cities
or even continents. If you work frequently with an organization in India,
for example, you could give it a local Toronto phone number. With a broadband
Internet connection, your Indian colleagues could call any number in the
Toronto calling area for free - and you could call them.
- Assign staff to satellite locations like libraries, shopping malls or home offices, and allow phone calls to follow them wherever they go.
- Move to another location without changing your phone number, whether it's to permanent new offices or to a temporary space for a couple of weeks while your agency's plumbing problems are fixed.
- Set up complicated routing rules so that callers can be automatically forwarded to different phone numbers based on their phone numbers or the time of day. So, for example, your phone extension might ring at the shopping mall on Mondays and Wednesdays, at the library on Tuesdays, and go to voice mail the rest of the time - unless it was from your child's school, in which case it would automatically be forwarded to your office phone.
- Get phone numbers for new project staff instantly, and cancel the service as soon as the project is finished. No waiting for a month to get phone lines set up.
These features have been available for a couple of years for companies that are
willing to buy and manage the hardware and software to run their own phone systems.
They are also available to individuals through services like Vonage. But until now, they haven't been accessible to small organizations and businesses
that need a hosted service.
I'm now looking at a new hosted VOIP phone service that, as far as I know, is
the first in Canada that is suitable for entire organizations. It's offered
by Congruent IP Communications and
is based on Nortel's
MCS 5200 Communication Server. I haven't finished testing it yet, so I'm
not endorsing it, but it's a good example of the services that will be widespread
very soon. At a cost of up to $55 CAD/month per user depending on the service
package, Congruent offers a full corporate phone system based on broadband Internet.
I've heard that Quartet
Communications offers a similar service also based on Nortel's technology,
but I wasn't able to reach them before this article was written.
Like a regular office PBX, you get a central number with extensions and voice mail. You also get individual direct dial phone numbers for each person, fax-to-email service, voice mail messages that can be sent to email or picked up from the phone, and many other fancy options (for a demonstration you can contact Congruent). The voice quality seems great, though I haven't tested it in depth. Long distance charges anywhere in Canada and the continental US are 4.5c/minute (CAD) unless you are calling someone on the Congruent network; in that case, there are no long distance charges.
The price of full-featured VOIP is similar to regular phone service, but with many more features and a few disadvantages. The major advantage is the ability to grow and shrink your telecommunications structure quickly as projects come and go, and to enable more flexibility in where you offer services. Agencies may be able to cut down on office costs because staff aren't tied to telephone 'land lines'. Telecommuting becomes much easier, because office extensions can forward transparently to staff wherever they are. (And they can maintain privacy since staff don't need to give out their home phone numbers to anyone.)
VOIP can handle some kinds of business disruptions better than regular phone service. Disaster recovery is simple - if your office is closed down because of fire or flood, you can instantly forward everyone's phone lines to other locations or have people plug into another Internet broadband connection in rented accommodations.
One big disadvantage of VOIP is that your voice services are dependent on your
Internet connection, so if that goes down (e.g., because of a power shortage
in your building), you've lost your phone system. Poor Internet connections
will decrease the voice quality, so you may require a better Internet service
than the one you have now. Organizations should have a regular phone line or
a mobile phone to call emergency services if the connection goes down. For more
technical and historical information about VOIP, see
this article.
There are similar phone systems available in the Toronto area that provide some
but not all of these features. RealWorld Systems currently uses Unite
for our corporate phone system, which we've found reliable and inexpensive,
but it only forwards to existing phones rather than replacing them.
Some of the available VOIP features may sound weird or irrelevant at first blush. For instance, with a wireless Internet network, staff can use pocket PCs as wireless telephones, sending and receiving email and text messages or taking notes on their tiny handheld computers while talking on their headsets. It will take creativity and persistence for agencies to figure out how to use the amazing computing power available to them. For instance, I'd like to see more accessible and cheaper phone interpreting services, in which interpreters set up 3-way call conferencing between clients and service providers in remote locations, using encrypted voice communications while at the same time tracking the length and type of calls for billing purposes. Unfortunately, people get freaked out by too much complexity, so for now, VOIP will do better by looking like regular phone services. Still, as Jill Rucci from Congruent says, "This service allows you to control your communications on a whole new level - this is going to change everything".
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Gillian Kerr, Ph.D., C.Psych.
President, RealWorld Systems
gkerr at realworldsystems.net
Read my weblog at http://blog.realworldsystems.net
