atcomsystems.ca/forum Forums General General Telephone & Systems Information Is VoIP an attempt to steal phone tech work?

Old telephone guys/gals... I am one of you too. Do I feel like I am being edged out of the telephony business by computer and networking pro's? You bet. Yes, VoIP is the "buzz". Yes it makes sense in certain applications and no it is not for everyone. But here's the irony of the situation. In the face of adversity comes opportunity. So, the good news is that while some clients are rushing out to get the latest in "gotta have" VoIP gear they are discarding perfectly good, and in many cases, reliable, feature robust legacy telephony systems, many of which are available at unbelievably low prices. So, here is our challenge... to convince our clients that we can sufficiently meet their telecom needs with legacy gear and we can do so to their advantage. Obviously this has the potential to be a better value proposition for small to medium sized businesses. We have to become better consultants to our customers and more effective communicators of this value proposition. The ride is not over for legacy systems yet. It is up to us to leverage the pitfalls of VoIP solutions in circumstances where it makes sense to do so and to bow out where it doesn't. Finally, it is up to us as true solutions consultants to learn new technologies and know when it is appropriate to apply them. This is just my humble opinion. RFC phones@biz

But it is deeper than that! I knew this was coming so did my CCNA, I then went to work for a company that did IT and voice and for about 5 years all was ok. They then started doing a VoIP solution and decided that the IT techs could do the phone work so made me redundant! Funny thing was, I was more qualified in IT than any of their employees and just one week after I was made redundant, I was called back in as a contractor on about 3 times the hourly rate (I knew I wasn't redundant as in Oz Certain aspects of Telecoms is a registered trade and without registration it is illegal to work on some items). Simple fact is that your average IT person doesn't understand telecomms and it is adversely affecting the industry! The swing will swing back in the other direction eventually, I just hope they haven't done irreparable harm in the meantime.

Here in OZ as Voip increasingly becomes the way of delivering phone services, we are having to find ways to harden services such as lift phones are now being delivered via 4G (and as technology progresses these units will need to be upgraded to 5G and so on) and they need to be dual sim with different providers with UPSs that can also monitor the battery status so that they will continue to work in power outages. Can you imagine the lawsuit if someone dies in a lift because the UPS fails?

We are moving to high speed data at the cost of fragility in the voice network and it will take deaths for the politicians to realize they are responsible, but when they do, the swing will reverse!

You're replying to a 6 1/2 year old thread

Locking down the topic.