vnunet.com analysis: Beware the siren cry of VoIP

First we had the big move by consumers to the use of mobile phones only, and then we had the massive disruptor of Voice over IP.

VoIP offers minimally priced (or free) calls worldwide and it's easy to set up, so only a fool will have stayed away from the use of VoIP, right?

Well, it seems that VoIP still has some way to go. Not only are there millions of consumers and businesses that still haven't heard about VoIP, but there are those who have tried it, and are now wishing they hadn't - particularly in the SMB space.

The kit tends to work. That's a given. VoIP handsets are now pretty much standardised around the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), which means that you don't require specific handsets with specific systems, although you may find that support is difficult to obtain in a mixed environment.

But call quality isn't just dependent on the vendors' kit; there's a whole host of other issues that need to be dealt with. The main one is that VoIP traffic needs managing, and this has to be end-to-end.

Any break in this management, whether it be handset to Lan, Lan to PBX (if one is being used), on the Wan or from the Wan to the receiving handset, means that there is a capacity for call degradation.

This degradation can be caused by network latency, by packet jitter, by poor bandwidth management or by additional latency being introduced as the call passes from one network owner to another through edge-of-network devices that provide active filtering.

Then we have the need for existing firewalls to be able to understand SIP. If you have a relatively new commercial firewall this should not be a problem. But for a firewall that's two or more years old, you may find that setting up SIP to work at all is difficult, and in some cases impossible.

Then there's the actual functionality of VoIP; having fallen for the siren cry of VoIP a couple of years ago, I spent a chunk of last year looking for suitable solutions for an SMB.

With a distributed team such as ours, the solution that made the most sense was an IP Centrex (a hosted VoIP service).

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