Enterprises winging in it with VoIP deployments

Stuart Corner
Monday, 30 July 2007 08:17

Business IT - Technology

Advice from vendors of IP telephony systems is that enterprises contemplating an installation should audit their network first to ensure it is able to provide the capacity and low latency that voice demands, but feedback from delegates at a VoIP seminar suggests that this advice is not being followed.

Verizon Business held panel discussions on VoIP and Unified Communications in Sydney and Melbourne recently. According to Sean Barkley, regional manager, advanced voice solutions at Verizon Business, a show of hands at the Melbourne session revealed only about 20 percent of enterprises conducting pre-installation audits. In Sydney, the percentage was even lower.

Barkley confessed to being very surprised by the result. "I believed that everybody would do an audit. Here [in Sydney] three people did an audit. In Melbourne, two people did an audit. That completely stunned me and convinced me that to go into professional services auditing networks is probably where I'm going to make my money."

He added: "One of the biggest issues is that everybody looks at their network and assumes that, 'it is just a little bit more data that we have to deal with, so we should be fine'."

He cautioned that looking at the volume of pre-IP telephony traffic was not always a good indication of post-IP telephony voice traffic, because companies start using the low cost IP telephony links to route outgoing calls into the public network at the office nearest to their destination.

One delegate, from a large legal firm, admitted that there had been concerns about performance when the firm was planning a move to IP telephony, and he said that, to address these, the firm had simply over-provisioned network capacity.