atcomsystems.ca/forum Forums VOIP Phones & IP PBX VoIP & Cloud Phones, Hosted PBX, General IP Phones Beware of VOIP?

I don't buy into everything he says, and sorry to be linking to Sandman again, but this IS an interesting read if you are looking into or moving toward VOIP. Like I said, I don't go with everything Mike says, but it's good reading, and gets people thinking.

https://www.sandman.com/VoIPresearch.html

I think most of what he is saying is SAGE advice and should be well healed . It's the Gumby like character on the diving board I can't figure out .

I'm sorry, but most of this article sounds to me like the griping of an old time tech who is unable - or in this case perhaps more likely, unwilling because of financial interests - to grow or keep up with the new technology and wants to convince you to do the same!

I used to be into restoring old Cadillacs - late 50s to mid 60s. To me he sounds like the same kind of bitching and moaning I used to hear from old time car mechanics about fuel injection, electronic rotors and abs breaks.

Is anything he said false - well I know from personal experience that 911 for example works JUST FINE on Vonage lines for example.
But it's mostly the anecdotal ad homs and straw-men!

For every single customer he points to with issues, I can point to one for whom it's working just fine! And even without his admission that
trying to get tech support from a traditional service provider is not ANY easier (that's one of the major reasons that customers are flocking to alternative providers - most frequent comment I get is "well it can't be any worse then what I am getting from Verizon now and it's half the price) all you have to do is read Ed's continued soap box about his Verizon nightmares.

Are there issues with VOIP? YOU BET?
But what exactly is new about that? They're different issues from the past, but if legacy systems were/are as bullet proof and easy as he seems to claim then WHAT THE HELL are we doing being telephone technicians, besides ripping off our customers by charging them money for working on equipment that never breaks, has no compatibility issues and can do everything the customer always wants . Or for that matter what the hell is he doing being in business selling equipment that is almost exclusively related to solving hard, unique and weird issues that come up with the very same legacy systems he claims are ever SO supperior to the new fangled solutions???????

I agree with you there Corywn. It seemed as if he was rambling on and jumping from topic to topic and covered just about everything bad you can imagine.

There was one decent paragraph about users going from a key system to a PBX environment that really hit home though. It was near the end. That's exactly what we are going through with a hospital that we recently cut over. Even after seven full days of training, much of it one-on-one, they still can't comprehend the requirement to transfer or park a call now.

Mike has some truly unique ideas and certainly unique products, but I have to say that I was a bit disappointed in his story.

It seemed as if he was rambling on and jumping from topic to topic and covered just about everything bad you can imagine.

He'd fit in really good here.

I knew there was something I liked about Mike Sandman.

-Hal

Corwyn,
Well said!
You have saved the rest of us misled folks alot of typing!

Oh! I figured HAL would appreciate every word!! :dance:

Has anybody ever heard of the apple and oranges analogy? Well Sandman has the entire Dallas Fruit Market in that article. VoIP is the most misunderstood acronymn in the telephony business today. Voice over Internet Protocol is a multitude of standards that boils down to one thing: packetizing voice (speech) at point A using CODEC's (Coding>Decoding, another acronymn) and the 7 Network OSI Layers in transferring to Point B and completing the process. Most people don't understand there is VoIP that is managed (within an organization's network infrastructure) and un-managed (which utilizes the IP cloud most commonly referred to as the world wide web) for point to point voice networking in the case of hardware considerations. The un-managed network infrastructure is the one that has created the biggest black eye for VoIP! Then the telephone system hardware is dragged in and blamed for poor performance when actually somewhere the network infrastructure is improperly adapted or configured (lack of bandwidth, QoS, antiquated level two and three switches, routers, etc, etc.) Then there are the VoIP services from the CLEC's, ILEC's, LEC's, and recently RBOC's. There are more VoIP services being utilized by the carriers than most are aware of. I read an article a few weeks ago that predicts total VoIP utilization by all carriers around 2008 eliminating copper POTS lines. Then the gas gets thrown onto the VoIP fire with SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) standard which is heavily being adopted at a fast pace by everyone today. CBeyond which is headquartered in Atlanta and has numerous cities for available service, introduced SIP at the end of 2005 for availability. Our business is transgressing towards a software environment and this is more apparent everyday. I hope Mike has the opportunity to read this thread and understand the full VoIP spectrum has not been reviewed. (That's my dollar for today, any chance of change?)

Very well said. No change. You definitely said a dollar's worth.