atcomsystems.ca/forum Forums General General Telephone & Systems Information The Shift to Data has already occurred.....

There is a very good letter to the editor in the November 6th issue of PC Magazine. If any of you have it, it is titled 'A VoIP Reality Check'
Finally, someone who actually understands that traditional phone systems exist for a reason!

So now that we've established that VOIP is starting to become a large market, and there is a convergence happening between us and IP... what you you guys think is the best path to learning these VOIP systems.

If you can't beat 'em...

RE: If you can't beat'em
VOIP is a done deal,and we all are running into various eq. that needs to hook to lan or wan via,routers,thru firewalls,etc. I am aligned with several CG's for network cabling and they give me advise with just a phone call. My biggest weakness is terminology then intergration{PC PROGRAM} from their side to mine. Over time I've learned what should work,but its getting there thats hard. I don't like to depend on 3rd party avalibility for repair or programing when it effects runtime of system.

One of my regular customers asked me if I could stop by on Friday morning to have a word with a salesman about phone service.

What was he pushing initially? Yep, trying to sign them up to go totally VoIP. The sales patter just kept rolling out as he emphasized "moving forward by going digital" over and over.

I asked him if he could guarantee quality of service with VoIP. Apparently, yes! :rolleyes: I quizzed him further. It seems his company is installing dedicated fiber links just for VoIP between its centers, so they can regulate traffic to maintain quality. That may or may not be true, I don't know, but it's of little significance since this company's nearest plant is miles away.

I asked him how that guaranteed service worked after the traffic left his company's network and encountered all the usual contention issues on the net out to our rural neck of the woods. I pointed out that there was no way he could guarantee a maximum packet transit time through parts of the network his company did not control. I'm not even quite sure he understood what I was talking about.

After a few more attempts with the usual sales bluff, I told him flat out that there is no way I'm going to recommend that the business goes over to VoIP as its sole telephone service. Calls which will "probably be O.K. most of the time" just ain't good enough.

Clearly deciding that he wasn't going to get a VoIP sale, he then started in on ISDN and multi-voice channels, a complex equipment lease-purchase scheme, and a call package which while offering reduced rates on the calls themselves would leave them no better off than they are now. In fact as we've just managed to get an extra 25% discount on all calls from BT for volume, they'd probably have been worse off.

We're talking about a backstreet store in a small town here, which at the moment has two POTS lines, one with DSL. The place seldom has more than two people working in there at a time, sometimes only one.

The final kicker was that his company could completely take over the existing two analog lines, again with a complicated equipment lease package to "move them forward" with modern equipment. One of the partners in the company jumped in at this point and asked about repair, how quickly engineers could come out for line faults etc.

I know what the answer should have been, but according to the salesman they have engineers all over the country ready to pounce at a moment's notice who deal with all faults themselves.

Wrong! In this backwoods part of Norfolk all the local loops and C.O. plant is still entirely owned by BT. Any other company "taking over" a line really does so in name and accounting only, since faults have to be reported to BT's relatively new OpenReach division for action.

I don't have to tell you my recommendation, do I?

Over here the only visible tax which is added to the bill is 17.5% VAT (sales tax). Of course, the phone companies have so many license fees and other taxes to pay that they just increase the basic rates to cover them.

So while the U.K. system makes it look cheaper with just the one tax, I can't help feeling that the U.S. billing with the taxes broken down gives a better indication of where all the money is going.

As I've said about the cost of gasoline over here, if everybody was handed a bill which said "Fuel £2.50, tax £7.50" it would open a few eyes (and those proportions are about right).

Ding-ding........Ding-ding.........Ding!

(Sorry, I didn't have any quarters! )

So while the U.K. system makes it look cheaper with just the one tax, I can't help feeling that the U.S. billing with the taxes broken down gives a better indication of where all the money is going.

There may be a better accounting of taxes on our bills but it is by no means complete. There are still other taxes that are just rolled into the basic rate like franchise fees that the TELCO pays to each municipality on a local level.

One day soon the cable companies and other alternative telcom providers will be hit with the same taxes which will either put them out of business or remove their competitive advantage.

As far as I'm concerned, unless you string your own cables you are using the public network and all traffic should be taxed the same if there are going to be taxes. Right now the only advantage low cost transport methods have over others is due to no taxation.

-Hal

That and the $10 for CID and $8+ FCC poor and downtrodden fee.

Carl

I heard that once from Lucent. "We have an army of engineers available..." Turns out they also have a larger army of customers.

Are there other telecom companies who have equipment (in CO's and in the ground) or is it like America where most of that is still a function of the Bell/AT&T? I say Bell/AT&T realizing I'm liable to be corrected on that one. Point is, does BT control it all or do they have to sell services to what in the US are called CLECs?

We have local-loop unbundling where other companies install equipment in the C.O. and the line is then jumpered across from the MDF, but the local loop from that point right out to the customer's demarcation point is under the new BT OpenReach division. OpenReach (which was only created at the beginning of last year) is supposed to provide services to both BT itself and to all other companies on an equal basis. There's also partial LLU for DSL service.

At the moment though, it's only the larger towns which have any C.O. presence of other companies. Out here in the boondocks everything is still completely BT, with any other company providing service simply sub-contracting to BT Wholesale, another fairly new division of BT.

The cable companies own their own lines outright, but again these are only to be found in the larger town and cities. The nearest to me are in Norwich (largest city in the county) and Gt. Yarmouth, both about 20 miles away.

Was this brought about, as it was in America, by government regulation?