Technology Disruption and VoIP - Replacing Five Nines with Three Nines

You know, I can’t remember the last time I picked up a regular land line phone and it didn’t work. If there’s a power cut, everything else doesn’t work, but pick up a regular phone and it works quite happily.

So, what is driving VoIP adoption? Well, for most people the main driver is cost. You can call people anywhere in the world, if not for free, then certainly for little cost.

Unfortunately, you may have to put up with lower reliability.

If my broadband connection is anything to go by, there is a vast difference between telco phone reliability and internet reliability. I don’t know whether this is a last mile problem or an internet backbone issue and frankly I don’t care. Whilst my broadband is reliable enough for surfing most of the time, I wouldn’t want to do anything mission critical with it.

Recently, I phoned up my broadband provider to try to trouble shoot a problem. Quite reasonably they wanted to run a line test. Unfortunately, I don’t use the modem they supplied when I registered. I bought a nice shiny new ADSL modem router with built in firewall. Altogether a much more secure way to connect a PC to the wild west frontier that is the internet. The tech support person, upon hearing about my nice router, said that they couldn’t possibly help me as I am using non-standard equipment which they don’t support.

The above scenario does bring into sharp relief one big problem with VoIP. How can problems be fixed in a timely manner when traffic crosses lots of different networks run by many different providers. If I have a problem with my VoIP, is it my equipment?, is it a last mile problem or an internet problem? Are all of the providers just going to play support ping with me, always blaming somebody else with the fault.

With a regular telco they own everything phone socket to phone socket. If there is a problem they are in an excellent position to fix it.

I guess a lot of the arguments for and against VoIP depend upon where you are coming from. Plainly, an enterprise user is coming at it from a different angle than a small to medium sized business. An enterprise company may already have a resilient network or at least find it cost effective to put one in place. A small or medium sized company will probably not have a resilient network infrastructure in place. Building a five nine infrastructure to support VoIP will probably remove many of the potential cost savings from such an installation. Do you want to be closing a sale on the telephone only for your broadband router to pack up mid conversation?

My shiny new router died a mere 24 hours after I installed it. It needed the TLC of a reboot to get it back on track. IT companies get away with murder releasing unreliable products.

If I were an executive at a telco I would be quite bemused that my product was being challenged by something so patently inferior for so many users.

About the Author

Jack Hughes Jack Hughes possesses extensive experience in the design and implementation of software projects, particularly specialising in network management and communications. In 2003 he co-founded OPENXTRA together with Denis Laverty using his skills as the technical and programming expert within the company as its Chief Technical Officer.