Baseline magazine: Mastering Your VoIP Migration

Getting your company ready for a telephone switch migration is never easy. It is especially difficult when you are trying to move toward a voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) implementation. Before you choose a VoIP system, be sure to ask yourself these five essential questions that I describe in detail in my current story for Baseline magazine.

Jazinga low-end VOIP PBX system reviewed

I last looked at low-end VOIP PBX systems about two years ago when I reviewed the Linksys SPA9000 for Computerworld here.

This is a small box that connects to your broadband Internet and allows you to hook up four IP telephones and use them as your main telephony system. A new company called Jazinga has recently begun their own version, the MGA120. It also sells for about $1000 but is much easier to setup and operate. The box comes with a customized version of the popular VOIP Asterisk operating system, and all the setup and configuration is Web-based. You plug in your phones, fire up your Web browser, and in about 15 minutes you have a complete working PBX and phone system.

I liked the fact that you can have some of the more advanced features such as voicemail that is converted to email attachments, music on hold and auto attendants without having to get dirty with command-line syntax and Linux-like text editors. The box also includes a Wifi router too, just in case you don’t already have one. The menu screens are fairly straightforward and easy to navigate, and there are setup wizards that walk you through 95% of the configuration too. I didn’t like that the company doesn’t yet have much information on where to buy the box on their Web site, such as VOIP supply.

You still need to purchase your VOIP service from another vendor. Hopefully they will work out their channel strategy soon and make it more of a one-stop shopping experience.

Being proactive with customer communications with Varolii

I am attending the Varolii customer conference today. The company makes proactive unified communications tools that are used by call centers to manage their customer communications. Big companies like airlines, banks, Staples, UPS and others use their products. I’ve met some of the IT managers that have deployed this service and find it interesting to hear what their challenges are and how they are using the Varolii tools. It is all about being proactive, and reaching out to their customers before someone has a problem, or is behind on their payments, or is about to go to the airport and find out that their flight is delayed. 

The company makes 4 million outbound calls on behalf of its customers daily. That is a lot of calls. Their system works across voice, email, and text messages and an upgrade is in the works to manage customers’ preferences (for example, Gen Y folks like to get texts as their primary touchpoint). 

Staples for example, lets people order online and pickup from the closest store. Varolii does the automated notification to the customer that the order is available for pickup. 

Southwest Airlines even has a “proactive customer service manager”– Fred Taylor Jr. — who’s job it is to develop these outbound communications tools. During the early March snowstorms in the Northeast, they sent out about 19,000 messages in a matter of a few minutes to tell passengers about the delays. They are working on expanding their system for gate change announcements too. “We want to do a really good job with following up with our customers after they fly us to make sure they continue to fly with us,” said Taylor. One of the reasons Southwest picked Varolii was because their voice messages didn’t sound robotic and were therefore more likely to be listened to than competitors’ products.

Digital Landing.com: Internet Voice for small businesses

Internet voice offers plenty of potential savings and productivity for small businesses. You can pay a fixed fee for monthly calling plans that include unlimited long distance coverage of North America and have the ability to program your phone to follow your movements without ever having to talk to a phone company representative ever again.

You can read more about the various issues to consider over on my story for DigitalLanding.com here.

Saving money inside your wiring closet

Here is a brief exercise in how to save some money for your company, and make yourself a hero at the same time. Do a quick census of the gear inside all of your wiring closets. You don’t have to be too anal here: just quickly estimate the number of ports, regardless of whether or not they are in use. Now use some fudge factors for the number of watts per port – if you have this information, fine, otherwise for the purposes of this tally, use 50 watts for unpowered Ethernet and 500 watts for powered ports, and add in the power consumption figures for anything else that is plugged into an electrical outlet.

 

Now add up the kilowatt hours and multiply by the cost of electricity in your area. If you don’t know, say 15 cents per kwh. Surprised at how big this is? Now here is where the hero part comes into play: suggest that you replace some of this gear with switches that can turn themselves off during off-hours.

 

Hunh? “Our networks have to operate 24×7” you say. “We can’t turn anything off. What about the people that come in on the weekends?”

 

Still, think about it. I got the idea after visiting Adtran this week, and they were showing me some of their switches that do just that. You can set up profiles for particular ports on the switch to shut off at certain times of the day, or to provide less power to those ports that are just running to ordinary PC endpoints. You wouldn’t think this would add up to a lot of saved juice, but if you have a lot of powered Ethernet ports – say supporting Wifi access points and VOIP phones – it can really add up quickly, into the tens of thousands of dollars a year. This could easily pay for part of the upgrade to your infrastructure.

 

Switches aren’t the only things that can cycle their power loads down these days. Intel’s latest multicore chips have the ability to turn off several of their cores to save on electricity, or to funnel processing to particular tasks to match their computing loads. There are virtualization provisioning products that will automatically spin up virtual servers to match increased loads, and then spin them down when the loads drop.

 

It is funny, when you think about it. Going green these days means getting a more powerful box and turning stuff off. Makes you stop and think, doesn’t it? Oh, and when you are done, ask your boss to give you at least a third of the savings as a bonus, and tell them I put you on to the idea. You can thank me later.

Is Your Network VOIP Ready?

Enterprises that want to get the most use of Voice over IP (VOIP) need to understand the issues involved in hardening their network and Internetinfrastructure before they begin to deploy this technology. In my story in this month’s Baseline magazine, I ask the five most important questions you need answers to before you take the VOIP plunge.

Testing the Managed PBX Waters

Hosted IP telephony services let users sample benefits without overhauling existing phone systems.
Corporations that haven’t yet gotten involved with IP telephony have a new method to test-drive this technology without a lot of up-front investment: They can use a hosted PBX managed services provider. While that’s a mouthful, the idea is relatively simple: Take a systems integrator that can provision an Internet connection between its office and yours, buy a couple of IP telephones, and the integrator takes care of the rest.

You can read the rest of my story, which appeared in this month’s Baseline magazine, here.

Making the switch to computer-based calling

I have been a user of Vonage for my main business line for at least four years and mostly a happy customer. But a series of anticipated moves this summer got me thinking: do I really need this service any longer? And so I have come up with a rather strange plan, so stick with me here for a minute while I explain how I got to my post-VOIP mobile telephony world.

I spend about $60 a month for my business telephone service: half on Vonage, half on AT&T for providing DSL service to my home (which I share for both home and business connectivity). This summer I will be moving across town and splitting off my office into a separate location. First I thought I would just get a cable modem and move the Vonage box and line over to run on that. That is the beauty of tying your business line to a VOIP service: it can move with you. Plus, with the cable downloads at 10 Mb, I can get those mission-critical movies and other image files that are so important to my day-to-day work life.

But the more I pondered that situation, the more I thought I would be better off if I got one of the AT&T broadband PC modems and used my computer for all my outbound calls. The modems are free with rebates and a two-year service plan, and you pay $60 a month for unlimited Internet access. Some of them are USB so can work with desktops, laptops, Macs or Windows. This is the same $60 a month that I was paying for my business line. The downside is that I won’t get anywhere near 10 Mb downloads, but that might cut back on the opportunities to view unneeded visual content.

I am already a big fan of Skype, and they offer an unlimited Skype Out subscription for less than $3 a month to everyplace that I would call with the Vonage account for the most part (you can get more expensive packages if you want to call international places). You can also purchase an inbound number for Skype for a few more dollars a month, but the number of people calling me doesn’t justify this, yet.

There are a couple of important caveats to note here. First, I make a lot of calls to conferencing services, so I need to be able to continue to dial touch tones after the initial call goes through. With Skype, this isn’t a problem: you get a cute little keypad that you can type in your conference number and PIN and away you go.

Second, more importantly, I no longer will be using the actual telephone that has been sitting on my desk for the past 16 years. Granted, this phone has been in many difference cities, and at the beginning of its life was used on New York Telephone where I was paying something like two cents a minute for local calls. The more I thought about my solution, the more I began to miss this old friend and desk totem. As a friend of mine said, it is like you have to clean out the last boxes from your old bedroom at your parents’ house. I will miss the concept of this old Ma Bell ringy-dingy most of all — even though it doesn’t serve any current purpose in my new post-VOIP life.

I don’t mind the headset, and in fact I have a whole passel of Bluetooth headsets that should work on my Mac and Windows PCs for the calls, if I don’t want to use the wired one.

But the third issue is the most important one. To make this trick work, I would need to port my existing Vonage number over to one of my wireless phones. The only way to know if you can do this is to go into an AT&T company-owned store (there are other franchise stores that look exactly the same so it pays to call their support line and find out) and ask them if it is eligible for porting.

I called my local AT&T store and first was told they couldn’t port any Vonage numbers. Then after I persisted, they said I could and just stop by. So far so good.

So what I have in mind is extreme mobility: I should be able to make calls anywhere I have my laptop, as long as I have AT&T broadband service (which should be in most of the major cities I am in). This also has the extra advantage that I am not trying to find Wifi service or have to pay extra when I am in a hotel or airport, because usually those places have wireless broadband. If not, I can use my cell phone, which will be my primary business line. And under the worse case scenario, I can carry an Ethernet cable (remember those) and a phone card and use a payphone!

I am interested in your experiences with the AT&T broadband PC cards, so leave a comment on my Strominator.com blog if you don’t mind. Do you think I am crazy, to contemplate doing this? I think it is kinda exciting.

Digital Landing.com: Understanding Internet Voice or VOIP options

If you have long distance phone bills on your home phone that are more than $50 a month, it is time to consider ways that you can save some real money by making use of one of many different technologies called digital voice or Voice over Internet Protocol (also called VoIP or Internet Phone). This article will compare the various services that are offered and provide information to help you decide whether or not this service is appropriate for you. For simplicity’s sake, we call this Internet Voice.

You can read more in my article that was posted today over on Digital Landing.com.

Digital Landing.com: Understanding bundles offered by high-speed Internet service providers

The cable and phone companies now promise even more confusion with their pricing with what they are calling “triple play.” In baseball, a triple play is usually something bad for the team at bat, but in the world of the Internet, it is supposed to save you money by purchasing all of your services from one communications company. That is the theory.

The good news is that you can generally save money from having all of your communications coming from one source. I tell you how in this story that was posted today over on Digital Landing.com.