The VoIP Mag

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The changing business environment has lead to a different set of communication needs for the organisations. For instance, now corporates have customers, dealers and suppliers from all parts of the world. Keeping in touch on an everyday basis is the necessity of the business. Not just this but organisations have branches in different countries or states too. Constant communication between these branches is of utmost importance in order to ensue smooth operations of the business.

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There would hardly be anyone who doesn’t blink twice after looking at their monthly telephony bill. You open the bill praying for the billing amount to decrease somehow miraculously but alas! For all our hopes are dashed to ground as soon as that white envelope is opened. Month after month the process remains the same. A substantial part of your hard earned money is spend on paying the telephone bill. If you have friends or family staying abroad then god save thy soul! Business houses specially have a hard time keeping their bills under control but all in despair.

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Enterprises have traditionally maintained separate networks for their voice and data traffic. Their circuit-switched voice networks provide the controlled environment needed for high-quality voice conversations while packet-switched IP networks deliver the flexibility and low-cost bandwidth needed to support ever-changing data requirements.
But the days of separate voice and data networks are numbered. Driven by new voice over IP (VoIP) technologies and the need to reduce network costs, many enterprises are designing new converged networks capable of handling both voice and data. The key challenge is to reconcile the performance requirements of voice with the unpredictable nature of data on a single network.
This white paper analyzes VoIP performance and bandwidth requirements and shows how Expand Networks ACCELERATORs help to deliver the required performance while reducing WAN costs in converged networks.
The VoIP Performance Challenge
The motivation for running voice over IP networks is to eliminate the expense of maintaining separate voice and data networks. It sounds easy enough to run voice over IP network – just encapsulate digitized voice in IP packets and go. Digitizing and packetizing voice is fairly straightforward, but there’s one other key issue that is much tougher to deal with.
The key challenge in building converged networks is performance. Voice communications has much more stringent performance requirements than data communications. The best way to understand voice performance requirements is to analyze the traditional voice communications network – the public switched telephone network (PSTN).
First, with the exception of most “last mile” copper loops, the PSTN is a digital network. Since human voice is analog, voice traffic must be digitized before it enters the network and then converted back to analog on the receiving end. Pairs of codecs (coder/decoders) at the endpoints perform the conversions between analog and digital signals.
To provide high quality voice the codecs use a technique called Pulse Code Modulation (PCM) that samples analog voice every 125 microseconds (1/8,000 of a second) and digitally encodes each sample as an 8-bit code. Since 8,000 of these 8-bit samples must be transmitted every second, PCM requires 64 kbps of bandwidth for each call.
To ensure the quality of each call, the PSTN uses multiplexing and circuit-switching technology to allocate a fixed 64 kbps channel for the duration of each call. Since the required bandwidth is always available, there is very little end-to-end latency, no jitter (variation in latency), and virtually no data loss. The net result is a consistently high level of voice quality, called toll quality.

The marriage of computer and telephone technology goes by the funny name of VOIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol). But the cost savings are no laughing matter.

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The single biggest advantage of an IP PBX is for businesses with multiple locations. With VoIP, any and all offices on a LAN or WAN can get the benefits of having a common office phone system, including extension dialing, seamless call transfers, and other features. In addition to making it easier to communicate, this sharing of features can enhance collaboration as employees at different locations can truly feel like they are part of the same organization. Plus, if they are on the company network, the phone calls are free – even if your offices are located thousands of miles apart. Simply looking at your current phone bill for calls between far-flung offices can give you an idea of how much you can save.

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Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) is a signaling protocol for establishing sessions in an IP network. But if you are like most of us, that means nothing to you. In layman’s terms, SIP is a method by which various computers can talk to one another so that they can complete voice calls. The protocol is increasingly being adopted as the standard means by which computers communicate to facilitate VoIP or Voice Over Internet Protocol. So you can imagine SIP as a common language for new generation operators to speak to connect calls. However, there are no operators there is only your computer (or other hardware) and that of the person you are speaking with. That brings this introduction to some of the many benefits of SIP communication. (more…)

Why go wireless? Many people today are asking the same question. VoIP is Voice Over Internet Protocol. It is also commonly referred to as VoIP, IP, Digital Phone, and Internet Telephony. VoIP is basically your voice traveling over the Internet as opposed to PSTN or the Public Switched Telephone Network.

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The vast array of features that VoIP has to offer allows the technology to be used in a myriad of ways. One advantage VoIP telephony has over traditional phone service is its ability to travel with you. By this, we mean that with VoIP you can travel locally or internationally and keep the same number, move house and have no break in service or simply go on vacation and have your same number and features. Cell phones can potentially fill this niche, however it is expensive to have a service that will work internationally and when moving house or going on vacation there is no guarantee that there will be coverage at your new location. (more…)

A desire for cost savings on long-distant calls and infrastructure expenses is leading more and more companies to implement voice over IP (VOIP) technology, according to a report from Sage Research. In fact, over the last half of 2000, VOIP adoption rose from 5 percent to 19 percent among large enterprise organizations, and from 7 percent to 13 percent among small and midsized organizations.

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VOIP IS BIG NEWS FOR growing businesses. The cost savings, convenience and features are well-known, but there are a few drawbacks that you should be aware of. The good news is that many of these issues can be dealt with through proper planning and implementation.

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