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.

Channel Cast Podcast: Trinet Systems and selling VOIP convergence

Converged network solutions can help create efficiencies in growing organizations, such as the Boston Celtics, explains Mark Damphousse, CTO of Trinet Systems, in this Channel Chat podcast.

 

Listen to the podcast here.

New VOIP services

I had a chance to compare two new Internet phone services from Ooma and MagicJack. Let me summarize what I have learned in the table below:

	MagicJack.com	Ooma.com	Vonage.com V-Phone	Skype.com
Initial cost	$40 for first year	$400	$40	$96/yr
Recurring cost	$20/yr following years	None	plus monthly Vonage service
911 features	Uses E911 PSAP	Uses landline 911 (2)	Use Vonage PSAP	None
Headset or analog phone?	Either supported	Analog Phone	Neither needed (mic included)	Headset + PC
Free calling area	North America	USA	North America	Various countries (1)
Mac OS X support	Not yet	Uses phones	Not yet	Yes
Notable features	Headset or phone	Second line	Built in mic	International reach
Drawbacks	Few area codes yet avail.	Customer support	Tied to Vonage account	Dicey p2p network issues
Email voicemail notifications?	Yes	No	Yes	Yes
(1) Skype pro provides unlimited calling in a single country that you receive the phone number for.
(2) Please note that in order for the ooma system to work, we will add call forward busy (”CFB”) when we provision your line, for which you will owe your landline phone company associated monthly charges

So what are these new services? Ooma is a small box about the size of an answering machine that hooks up to both your broadband Ethernet and your land voice line. MagicJack is a bit bigger than a USB key drive that connects to your computer’s USB port. They have very different approaches, and are not for everyone.

MagicJack is a way to supplement your existing landline or cellular service. If you have a loved one that is living overseas, or someone who travels a lot, then this makes sense. At a fixed price of $40 and $20 for the second and subsequent years, it is a low enough price point that you can send it to someone living abroad, have them register with a US phone number, and then you can have cheap unlimited talk time. The nice thing about the gizmo is that you can either hook up a standard analog phone to it, or use whatever PC-connected sound device you’d like: it can toggle between both. It doesn’t yet have many local phone numbers — when I tried it out, I could get as close as Memphis but nothing in Missouri as yet. But this is becoming less of an issue as many people have unlimited long distance plans anyway.

Ooma is much more expensive, and I am not sure where their market is: at $400, you have to make a lot of calls and the device requires a lot more commitment. You need to make changes to your landline calling features too. Its niftiest feature is the ability to give you a second outgoing phone line, so you can get around a chatty teen who is always tying up your phone. But it has very poor customer support despite some initial buzz and a high initial cost to get their gear.

Both Ooma and MagicJack come with their own voicemail box that can send you email notifications, which is becoming standard in the VOIP world. Both supply unlimited calling in the US or North America, with additional per-minute charges to places beyond. Both support the better E911 services that aren’t the norm with most VOIP suppliers: ironically, Vonage offers a competitive USB gizmo called the V-phone, but 1) you need to sign up for a Vonage service plan to use it and 2) it doesn’t support E911, instead, emergency calls get routed to a Vonage operator.

The other entry in this sweepstakes is Skype. They of course only work on your PC, but they do offer Macintosh support, something neither the V-phone or the MagicJack presently have. They are a bit more expensive if you buy all the various options (you need Skype In to get a fixed phone number so people can call your PC at $60/year and Skype Pro to make outgoing calls at $36/year ) than either USB device, but they do offer local numbers in various countries, should that be important to you or if both of your frequently called parties are outside the US. Their Pro plan allows unlimited outbound calling to phones in whatever country you assign your phone number to your account.

What you pick will depend on a lot of different circumstances: if you are looking for a complete replacement of your landline phone with an Internet solution, I still think either Vonage or AT&T CallVantage is a better way to go than any of these products. If you make a lot of international calls to different places, then probably Skype is your answer. If your teen or traveling salesperson is tying up your phone or racking up cell minutes, then any one of these might be a lower-cost alternative if you want to keep your existing landline.

Clearly, the VOIP market is undergoing a lot of change, and a lot of players will come and (like SunRocket) go. As someone who uses Vonage daily for the past four years, I am watching avidly what is going on.

The coming VOIP onslaught

For a webinar I am doing for Tippit.com entitled:

The Coming Voice Onslaught: How VoIP Will Cripple Your Network (And How to Defend It)

Channel chat: Steve Harvey of Digium

This week’s ITLink podcast is called “How to become a VOIP VAR” and my guest is Steve Harvey, who is VP of WW sales for Digium. As many of you might know, Digium is the company that is the commercial face of the popular open source VOIP PBX product Asterisk.

You can listen to the podcast here.

How to prepare your network for VoIP

Enterprises wanting to get the most use of Voice over IP need to know the steps involved in hardening their network and Internet infrastructure to get the best results out of their digital voice deployment projects. In this article published today by Computerworld, I talk more about what you need to know, including:

• What is your present Internet connection and how much bandwidth will you need for voice?
• What kind of wiring is in your walls?
• Will you need to support remote users that are working outside your headquarters office?
• What will you do with your existing analog phones?
• Can you keep your existing inbound phone numbers?
• Do you need to upgrade your network switches and routers?
• Do you really need to own your own IP PBX?

VOIP Business options

With Vonage, the pioneering Internet phone service, cast into doubt by an unfavorable ruling in a patent infringement lawsuit, this is a good time to look at other options for Internet business calls. In my story this week for the New York Times, I review the various small-business options for VOIP and IP PBX service.

You might also want to read a recent review of Linksys’ IP PBX device in Computerworld here.

Linksys low-end VOIP PBX reviewed

Linksys’ low-end IP PBX called the SPA9000 is reviewed in today’s Computerworld.com here. It is a capable system whose diminutive size hides a high level of complexity. While it packs plenty of features, getting some of them to work will require a great deal of patience, reading the manual and trial-and-error experimenting in the brave new world of business IP telephony.