Internet calling: is voice over internet protocol ready for prime time?

• Author: Lewers, Christine
• Position: Communications

LES KEITH SAYS IT'S NOT unusual for him to hear from companies that want Voice Over Internet Protocol technology without a clear vision of how it will benefit their company

"VoIP is in every business magazine you read," says Keith, sales and marketing manager with Dugdale Communications, a hardware and service provider of VoIP in Indianapolis. "If an executive takes a flight from New York to Los Angeles and reads about it, he's likely to come back to the office and tell his IT people the company needs it."

Getting the facts

Like any new technology buzzword, VoIP presents a challenge for businesses trying to sort out the facts. VoIP is simply a way of bundling voice data into digital packets using a method first designed to transport data over the public Internet.

What this means for businesses is that voice messages can now travel along the same network paths as data. Those network paths may or may not include the public Internet.

Businesses are motivated by savings, says Scott Wilson, president of Ultimate Medium, a VoIP service provider based in Carmel. He says for businesses the cost savings come from converging voice and data on a single network, rather than having to maintain separate networks for each.

But don't expect calls to come free, warns Wilson. He says for businesses that require consistent and high-quality voice delivery, Internet dialing just doesn't cut it.

Instead, companies deploying VoIP need network paths that are more controllable and give priority to voice traffic. This often takes the form of private broadband, cable and DSL lines, which are costly. Nonetheless, clients are saving in the neighborhood of 30 percent on their telecommunications, says Wilson and other business VoIP providers.

New efficiencies. "After they see it can save them money, the next thing they come to understand are the enhancements VoIP offers that can make their business more efficient," says Wilson.

Those enhancements include new ways of managing voice data that emerge when voice is put on a data network. For example, workers with VoIP can manage their voice messages the same way they do their email, with point-and-click ease. Want to make a phone call? Click on the telephone number. Want to set up a spur-of-the moment conference call? Click and drag numbers to that tool. The same goes for forwarding all your phone calls to a single number, muting calls and viewing phone logs.

In addition, VoIP is the starting point for unified messaging...