Understand why VOIP Technology is right for you Business
If you are like most business owners then when you first heard of VoIP Technology, you thought this would be a great way to reduce business telephone charges.
While in most situations, this does prove to be true, however there is a lot more to the story, particularly once you look at how a VoIP service option differs from older legacy PSTN type of phone service.
Voice over Internet Protocol (VOIP) has taken a slightly different evolutionary path than legacy Telecom services, and yes, while the services have many basic similarities, the value propositions diverge beyond that.
In order for a business in 2015 to properly assess the overall value of a VoIP Solution, you will need a Basic understanding of the service, and that is the purpose of this blog post.
The underlying technologies can be complex, but as a business owner you don’t need to go that deep to understand the nature of VoIP and how it can do things that legacy telephony cannot.
VoIP technology is the product of a this new era for communications industry, and has the benefit of many innovations that did not exist when the PSTN was developed. For that reason, VoIP offers value beyond everyday telephony, it can enhance productivity and the way you interact with you customers and if that is important in your decision- making process, this information will be very relevant.
Based on our ongoing research in telecom, we believe five basic elements of VoIP’s technology that have been identified for analysis, and we believe these will greatly strengthen your understanding as to both how and why VoIP will be good for your business.
The Five Technology Basics for VoIP
While VoIP has been a commercial technology since 1995, it has only in recent years reached a point where businesses can rely on it as their primary method of telephony. The underlying technology is very different from legacy telephony and not well understood.
The VoIP acronym has two components – voice and IP when compared to Traditional telephone, as we will explain below, telephony is just one mode of voice in an IP environment, and IP is the second component, and refers to Internet Protocol. This is a clearly-defined set of standards that allows data traffic to traverse not just a single IP-based network, but be handed off from one IP network to other IP networks With this standard in place, the “web” as we know it exists, serving a multitude of needs for anyone with a broadband connection. Taken together, these two components form VoIP, a service that is optimized for using voice over data Networks.
1) VoIP is data
Any discussion about VoIP technology basics really needs to start off here. It’s Surprising that this cornerstone concept is poorly misunderstood and is at the root of many problems that could be mitigated otherwise. Telephony has always been a voice based service, Prior to telephony was the telegraph, which operated on the same principle of sending an electrical signal over a wireline connection between two parties. Just as the telegraph was a revolution in communications technology years ago, so was telephony that quickly replaced it, Once we figured out how to transmit voice calls over a wire, there was no turning back. Not only was voice a better and faster way to communicate than tapping out dots and dashes, it also provided two-way, real-time conversation.
This historical lesson is important, because that fundamental shift has remained in place for over 100 years, and only recently been challenged by VoIP technology, With the exception of fax, the network that supports telephony is about voice – this is its primary function, and the PSTN delivers a consistently great experience. With VoIP, the inverse is not necessarily true. In other words, telephony is just one voice mode with VoIP. Landline telephony may be the driver for businesses built around VoIP, but voice can just as easily be routed over the Web to PCs or via WiFi to mobile devices. Since VoIP travels over data networks, any broadband-enabled device can be used as an endpoint for voice. This is very different from legacy telephony, where calls can only be routed to endpoints connected to the PSTN. Purpose-built networks are great for their intended purpose, but they don’t adapt well to change.
VoIP service, on the other hand, is built from the ground up to run over data networks, and this requires a fundamentally different technology. In order to do this, VoIP must
be transmitted in the same digital format as other forms of data Voice signals become converted to bits and bytes, and are really no different than other forms of digital media, such as email, chat or video. All these forms of communications or transmission flow over the same network in the form of data packets, and through the magic of IP-based technologies, they arrive at their destination the same way they were sent. Once you understand that voice is data, our thinking about telephony changes. The problem with legacy service, is that the telephone calls are provided over a dedicated network that functions independently of your data network, and this requires your business to support two parallel network environments – one for telephony, andone for everything else, which can be costly.
The key here is that VoIP has re-invented telephony service because it’s a data application rather than being a voice application. This is the first step to unlocking VoIP’s potential, and the story becomes stronger when tied into the next basic.
2) – VoIP uses a different network than legacy
VoIP technology uses the high quality and reliability of modern day built networks that can carry massive amounts of data which is more secure and reliable then old technology. Build from the ground up they perform and can be maintained at a fraction of the cost then Legacy networks this rudimentary world may seem idyllic compared with today’s Gigabit Ethernet, but the back story goes a long way to explaining why voice has been separate from data for so long. Now that everyone has high-speed broadband and Internet available – not to mention equally effective mobile communications options it’s easy to wonder why we need a separate voice network at all, not only is it redundant if you’re using VoIP, but it’s also expensive to operate.
As old legacy service gives way to new VoIP service, the expertise developed over several decades in managing the complexities of TDM networks will become harder to find, since today’s tech engineers are predominantly working with in IP only going forward, and running voice over your data network is not only inevitable, but now it’s even desired. One network is easier to manage than two, and with that come many cost efficiencies that any business would welcome.
3) – VoIP is packet-switched The fact that VoIP runs over a different network than legacy telephony is just one way that these services are different.
Another important difference is the first basic in this section. Thinking of VoIP as a form of data may seem counterintuitive, but that is how it looks to an IP network – really no different than the other streams of digital media being carried. This isn’t to say voice is any less special compared to legacy telephony. Rather, the same service is being provided, just using a different technology. Purists can debate whether VoIP really is the “same” as TDM, but certainly at a high level, they’re pretty interchangeable. There certainly are trade-offs with each service, and VoIP still has work to do to match the quality that TDM is rightfully lauded for, however, when businesses are paying for VoIP, they’re doing it to replace TDM, and for this to be a good decision and more economical. IP networks – of which the public Internet is a big part – are built on a common set of standards (Internet Protocol) which allows them to seamlessly share traffic. The result is massive web of connections that makes high-speed, low-cost communications a reality for pretty much everyone with access to broadband. With VoIP, a call is broken down into a series of packets When voice signals are converted into a digital format, the raw content cannot be carried by a single packet, Instead, the content is chopped up into discrete segments and transmitted by as many packets as needed to complete the call. Circuit-switching works on the principal of a call being a continuous series of electrical pulses that flow in real-time between two parties. To enable that, a dedicated circuit is established, over which these signals travel – back and forth between the callers While this makes for a high-quality experience, circuit- switching is costly, since each phone call requires one of these dedicated connections. Data networks operate very differently from voice networks, and the bottom line is that packet-switching is a far more efficient model in terms of utilizing network resources Even though a local VoIP call may travel around the world to be established, the flow of data packets is more cost-effective for a carrier than using circuit-switching for a legacy call.
4) – Voice is real-time.
There is a good reason why it has taken nearly 20 years for VoIP to become good enough for businesses to rely on. We take it for granted that the phones always work and the quality will be consistently good. Before continuing, let’s specify that this analysis pertains to land line telephony only. Mobility is a different situation altogether, and that is better left for another primer analysis. The PSTN also took decades to evolve, but we have long been accustomed to high quality telephony, but this quality comes at a cost, since the engineering challenges are quite complex. Basically, telephony works as well as it does because calls run over a purpose-built network. The PSTN does voice extremely well because that’s what it was built to do. A key reason why telephony is hard to do is the need to deliver this quality experience in real time. This is what the value proposition for legacy telephony is built upon, since the immediacy of voice is what matters most. Otherwise, people would choose other modes to get in touch. Now, VOIP technology has effectively dealt with these issues to deliver high quality, cost efficient calling.
5) – VoIP is still evolving
While this sounds rather unclear, it may well be the most important technology basic to consider, especially in contrast to the PSTN. Legacy telephony had a lengthy evolution path of its own, but once perfected in the 1970s, very little has changed since. The last innovation of note was the transition from analog to digital service, which is best exemplified by the change from rotary dial to push-button phones. The 10 digit keypad hasn’t changed since, and all forms of interaction with the service remain limited by the 1-0 number sequence along with the * and # buttons. Legacy service may still
be very reliable and high quality, but the Internet has been with us for a while, and the communications landscape has opened up considerably. The bar for telephony performance was set very high by the PSTN, and today’s VoIP is getting close, and is at least is good enough for businesses to rely on.
So far, VoIP’s evolution has been based on mirroring legacy telephone service and offering it at a lower cost. Again, this may be all that businesses are looking for, but longer term, what makes VoIP exciting are the possibilities that go beyond this. Since VoIP runs over the same data network as other communications applications, there is untold potential for new ways to use voice, not just on its own, but integrated with other modes. VoIP is no different than any other new technology in that the more you know about it, the better decisions you’re going to make. If you have a long history with legacy telephony, VoIP may be difficult to understand and even intimidating, but you don’t have to know it inside-out. There reasons for this is if VoIP is new to you, a basic primer is in order, and that is the purpose of this post and Randercom can help you with your options.
A lot has changed since then, and for this audience, our intention is to dispel some inaccurate notions and explain why and how VoIP is different. Our position here is not to judge and say VoIP is better, it’s definitely different, and in many regards is better aligned with where today’s technologies are going you are the best judge as to what’s best for your business, and all we can say is that the broader and longer view you take, the more the stars line up for VoIP.
Give us a call at (920) 731-3944 to review all your options and show you how VOIP Technology can improve your business.
