I Still Don’t Get VoIP
Published on 13 Oct 2006 at 10:51 am |
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Filed under The Cargo Cults of Business, Design, Interface, and Usability, Business and Corporation Related, Networking Technology, Information Technology, Branding and Values.
In which your correspondent observes a number of VoIP deployments, yet fails to notice a change.
In his unceasing struggles to earn his daily pint, your correspondent spends a fair amount of time on the premises of his clients. I should add that these clients represent the best and brightest of Silicon Valley, and a finer and more honorable collection of people can’t be found this side of a Nobel Prize committee. Many of these clients have replaced those tiresome, semi-proprietary office phone systems with new VoIP phones. Oddly, the new VoIP phones look the same as those tiresome older phones. They have the usual 12-key pad that we all understand, and the usual several-more buttons about whose function we’re never quite sure.
Ahh, but surely these new phones are easier to use. Dial-by-name, of course. Er, no? Quaint. I still have to enter the numerical address of the endpoint I wish to call? A bit like sending email to Eudora_client@192.168.81.103.
Reduced infrastructure, though. Well, once we pulled the extra cat-5 and installed the PoE gear. Then it was a snap to plug the phones in. We did rip out that funky old PABX, though. It was replaced with a funky new Dell server to run the VoIP software.
Yes, but the improved reliability of the converged infrastructure! We’re replaced SS7 - it’s been around for years; it must be out of fashion. We’ll use SIP now. It has a wee bit of field experience, though it’s a newbie compared to SS7.
Well, there is one unarguable difference. VoIP is digital. Err, well, so was the old stuff. But VoIP has longer packets that the old, 1-byte TDM packets. That’s a difference sure to appeal to any user.
Cost savings, no doubt. We fired the poorly-paid guy who maintained the old phone system, and replaced him with a highly-paid MCSE-certified IT professional. Happily, he brings to telephone system support the same level of cheerful help he brings to desktop PC support.
After considerable research (most of a bottle of Laphroig) I have identified one clear advantage to VoIP - it’s helped the sales performance of a number of VoIP vendors. Clearly a solution was needed to the problem of getting corporations to replace their fully functional phone systems.
Johna Till Johnson, as perspicacious a prognosticator as any, (and cute to boot) comments on Vonage’s business belly-flop here: ( http://www.networkworld.com/columnists/2006/092506-eye-johnson.html )
Perhaps Vonage’s difficulties stem from the fact that, when all is said and done, it’s no cheaper to run a consumer phone company with variable-length packets than it is to run one with fixed-length packets.
Your correspondent awaits a Skype-like client for VoIP. No phone numbers, please, I wish to call humans, not station instruments.
If ISDN was Innovations Subscribers Don’t Need, perhaps VOIP is Very Overrated unImproved Phone.
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