Dispelling VoIP Misperceptions

Some of the confusion surrounding VoIP isn’t unique. Fifteen years ago, people had the same fears, concerns, and misperceptions about the hottest technology of the time — ISDN. Today, the marketing machine for VoIP has promised that it will do everything but julienne potatoes, all for free or a low monthly package fee.

VoIP isn’t as great or as horrible as anyone portrays it.

Using more bandwidth

Just because VoIP is slick and new doesn’t mean that it’s entirely more efficient than traditional telephony. VoIP has both uncompressed and compressed call options. Each has its pros and cons (covered in topic 2), but they’re all contained within the same VoIP structure.
A standard non-VoIP call consumes slightly more than 64 Kbps of bandwidth, and you can place 24 consecutive calls over a normal dedicated 1.5 Mbps circuit. VoIP calls require more bandwidth to handle the additional overhead associated with packetizing it for transmission. If the media portion of the call isn’t compressed, the total bandwidth consumption of a VoIP call can exceed 120 Kbps. A full 1.544 Mbps circuit of uncompressed VoIP allows you only about 13 calls, barely more than half the total calls possible if the circuit were traditional telephony.
The good news is that the most common type of VoIP compression allows you to transmit over twice the number of consecutive calls over a 1.544 Mbps circuit. You can save a lot of bandwidth by using VoIP, but how much you can save depends on whether you’re compressing the media on the call. (topic 3 explains compression.)

Realizing that VoIP isn’t free

One of the biggest marketing campaigns surrounding VoIP was the idea that all VoIP calls were free. At one point in time, that may have been true. Before 2007, the U.S. government didn’t know how to tax VoIP calls, and so those calls were tax free. Before 2005, most VoIP calls were from one VoIP phone or computer on the Internet to another VoIP phone or computer on the Internet. By avoiding the infrastructure used by traditional telephony calls, it also avoided all the fees. As far as anyone else knew, the transmission wasn’t anything other than someone surfing the Web or sending an e-mail.
The business of VoIP has changed since then, and many people simply use VoIP to access a local or long-distance phone carrier. Companies such as Vonage or your local cable TV company (if it also sells local phone service) are typical VoIP providers. These companies set up a VoIP connection between your home and their switch, but if you’re calling your aunt in Florida or your grandma in Philadelphia, the call is still passed over the same legacy telephone network that it would if you dialed from a non-VoIP phone. Because the call uses the same switches and systems as a traditional telephony call means that the call is assessed per-minute rates in the same manner.

Any call that you make to a standard telephone number is charged a per-minute rate somewhere along the way. Even if you pay a flat monthly fee for unlimited long distance, your carrier is banking on the fact that it’s charging you enough to cover all the minutes it’s being billed for your calls.

Accepting that VoIP may not be cheaper than traditional phone service

VoIP’s launch marketing hype said that, although it may not be free, at least it’s cheaper than using the traditional analog phone lines and digital circuits. But it actually isn’t always cheaper. All the long-distance carriers are rolling out VoIP service, but not every small and medium-sized business can save money by using it.
Business customers traditionally purchased dedicated circuits from their long-distance carriers, which allowed them to aggregate traffic and get a lower per-minute rate on their calls. Most carriers have kept the same pricing for the per-minute cost of their calls because the calls’ networks and routing still go through the same systems. The main differences in the cost of VoIP, when compared with traditional telephony, are access fees and hardware costs.

Factoring in access fees

The phone carrier providing traditional dedicated circuit charges a monthly fee for the lease of the local loop, the cabling that connects your business to your carrier. A VoIP connection requires that you have not only a connection to a carrier, but also a port to the Internet, which usually costs an additional fee. You can generally use an Internet connection from another carrier to reach your long-distance provider, but then you have to worry about latency. Every server you encounter between your own server and your carrier represents a delay that can degrade the quality of your VoIP calls or simply cause your calls to fail. Before jumping into VoIP, be sure to compare how much IP bandwidth you need to match the total quantity of calls and consider all the loop fees and port costs.
The bandwidth used to place VoIP calls and traditional telephony calls can vary. A standard dedicated circuit that has 1.544 Mbps of bandwidth (called a T1 or DS-1 in America) is designed with 24 channels, each capable of processing a call. If your peak calling time has 24 calls going at one time and you don’t want to compress your VoIP calls, you need to order two T1 circuits. With two circuits, your cost doubles because you have to pay two local loop fees and two Internet port fees. If you compress your VoIP calls, you can use one T1 circuit for 48 consecutive calls.

Table 1-1 and Table 1-2 show how your choice in compressed or uncompressed VoIP has a direct impact on your bottom line. Contact your Internet provider for the exact local loop and Internet port costs.

Figuring out the hardware costs

Unless you’re creating a brand new company and phone system from scratch, you have to spend some money to either replace existing hardware or augment your network to handle VoIP. You don’t have to spend this money if you stay with your existing configuration, so you need to weigh this cost against the financial and business benefits of deploying VoIP. I cover the types of hardware in the section “Identifying the Hardware You Need,” later in this topic.

Worrying about compatibility

Whenever any new technology is released, everyone always worries about compatibility. You may be wondering, “Will I be able to communicate with other VoIP devices?” I have a Fuji digital camera that uses a memory card that works with only Fuji and Olympus cameras — and it doesn’t work in the photo printers at the local drugstore, either.
Looking at the compatibility headaches that came with other technologies, international organizations such as IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) and the ITU (International Telecommunications Union) established guidelines called RFCs (Request For Comments) about how to transmit VoIP calls. This international cooperation allowed everyone to work together to develop systems and logic for VoIP transmissions, instead of everyone making up their own versions and letting the market decide which technology would survive.
Even though these organizations set down the guidelines for the transmission of VoIP calls, programmers still wrote software based on their own interpretations, and the industry quickly realized that those small nuances made all the difference.
VoIP carriers identified this challenge and developed InterOperability (InterOp) testing to ensure that the custom software built for a small business would work with the custom software built for a long-distance carrier. For a period of time, every carrier had an InterOp program with a testing window of a few days to a few weeks. In this testing window, VoIP customers and carriers validated that both ends of a VoIP call could accommodate how that call was being packaged, processed, and managed.
That was then, and this is now. In spite of the fact that you can sit down and create your own version of the VoIP protocol, you don’t need to because you can find free software on the Internet that does it for you. You can download Asterisk or AsteriskNOW from http://asterisknow.com/ and instantly have every bit of software you need to send and receive VoIP calls. The VoIP industry now has a greater level of uniformity in software, and you rarely encounter incompatibility between VoIP devices anymore. Carriers no longer have to worry about InterOp testing (though some still offer it because they’ve built infrastructure to support it and they have an extensive pre-established set of test cases that need to be accomplished that normally can’t be concluded in a normal activation). They instead schedule a normal installation, just like they would if you were activating a traditional telephony circuit.
Many small businesses didn’t appreciate the elimination of InterOp testing because they used the InterOp test environment to test and confirm their own internal dial plans or configurations. InterOp was designed to ensure that a business’s VoIP server could effectively communicate with the VoIP

server of its carrier, but slick technicians extended the testing to confirm that their new find-me-follow-me service was functioning properly or work through some bugs in their internal dial plans.
VoIP installation (covered in topic 8) is a very straightforward process. Incompatibility between VoIP hardware is now as likely as incompatibility between traditional telephony hardware.

Rejoicing in good quality calls

The quality of your VoIP call depends almost entirely on the network over which it’s transmitted, from end to end. Long-distance carriers have been using VoIP within their own controlled networks for years. Almost every longdistance call you make is VoIP at some point during its transmission. VoIP is even more prevalent on international calls because the carriers that specialize in this niche market use standard VoIP compression techniques so that they can maximize the profit they get out of their current connections.
One of the first VoIP calls I received was from a programmer in Romania. I used a softphone that was installed on my work PC. The call had a lot of static and sounded like a radio transmission from Mars.
Now, almost every traditional telephony call you make is an example of the call quality you can expect on VoIP. It’s no longer a free service with skittish quality; it has established itself as a legitimate form of telephony that’s used, and offered by, all major carriers.