atcomsystems.ca/forum Forums Other TDM Phone Systems Allworx Telephones & Systems Some observations on VOIP.

I have seen VOIP deployed in a junk yard with 4 lines and 6 phones. They spent a small fortune for something that could have been picked up a key system off the shelf. No line appearances...I mean WTH with 4 lines? DHCP server keep going down from the computers locking up because of the heat and DIRT causing the system to lock up.

Shoretel phones? :rofl: Sorry, every time I see them I am like what was that person smoking designing those.

I know how to make IP work over 1500' of cable.

So do I now. It just isn't as easy as punching the cable down on one end and putting a jack at the other. :rolleyes:

brian703, when you complete your profile with a real address, not "USA", maybe your opinions will be taken with some validity.

Most individuals who fill out profiles in this manner are usually CGs. 'Nuff said?

:read:

Just a few other observations:

It seems the VOIP purveyors are going to the Microsoft model instead of the client server (Unix) model that our phone systems operate on. To wit, the phone sets themselves are a very integral part of the systems operation versus our model of dumb terminals hooked up to a server (KSU) that stores everything.

Just looking at this; https://wiki.snom.com/Snom320/Firmware leads me to believe that real issues are going to show up servicing VOIP. What version Asterisk or whatever do you have? What version phones do you have? What version phones will work with what other version phones? What version phones work with what version of VOIP box? If you update a phone will it quit working with whatever version VOIP box you're running? Since lots of information is stored in the set itself what happens when you replace a phone, will the VOIP server back up the phones data?

If what I believe is true then the long term service consequences will do nothing but complicate maintenance and cause the customer to incur quite a bit of additional costs. Of course from a revenue standpoint this would be a good thing for us. From the customer's satisfaction viewpoint it may well not be a good thing.

Ponder this, I have a Vodavi Triad III with 220 phones on it with dual 8 port voice mail systems that was installed years ago. It's a medical billing service that makes thousands of calls a day. I have never replaced a single card in the system and the average phone death has been running at less than 5 phones a year. No program changes and as far as I can tell it has never had even the most minor software fault or error processing calls. To top things off half the phones are 15+ years old from the prior 96EX system they had.

Is it even conceivable that any iteration of a VOIP system would even approach this kind of reliability? This customer is soon going to find out because some slick talking salesman has convinced them that they'll save a fortune and greatly enhance their business with a hosted VOIP solution. This will be interesting, especially the saving money part. The customer averages about $100 a month in service costs and has two PRI circuits at $299 each. They have no branch offices nor any home employees. They also told the customer that they would not need to change their switches since the Grandstream phones they are proposing work flawlessly on any data network. I've seen the traffic on their network, it's continuously bottlenecked from the extreme amount of data input.

Once again, am I wrong in my observations?

You are comparing an almost 40 year-old technology that has seen billions of investments in research and implementation with a technology that in real terms is barely 10 years old.
Also, there are several systems from Avaya, Cisco, Nortel, Siemens etc that can do most of the stuff you describe, and many others that circuit-swithed systems can't. And that is the ONLY REAL difference between VOIP and the rest:

VOIP switches packets.
Traditional telephony switches circuits.

Other than that they are both "digital", microprocessor-based systems. Also, it is not true that all traditional pbx/ksu systems are client-server. KSU-less systems are peer-to-peer. Some of the older pbxs were following the mainframe-dumb terminal model. Btw UNIX or Windows has nothing to do with client-server, it is just a model they may or may not use. They both use peer-to-peer, client-server, or mainframe-dumb terminal when it suits them.

Other than that, you make very valid points. The thing is that most companies already have infrastructure in lan cabling, lan switching etc. So often a new IP extension can be as simple as plugging in a phone to a lan jack.

All i can say is that it must be nice to have that kind of customer. I mean, they pay for the installation of one system, decide its not working for them, then pay YOU to rip it out and install something else. In times like these those customers are hard to find. Good Job.

Try posting the pile of surplus in the "Buy/Sell" forum, im sure you'll get a few offers.

Let me add that the vast majority of CGs that I've known are at a loss when it comes to VOIP. I They know how to plug it in, but making it work is a different story. Telecom was the unwanted orphan of IT - not glamorous enough, and quite arcane, talking about data telecom now. Voip requires a whole other skill set. I think CGs and telephone people are positioned an equal distance away from that skill set.
Seems like a lot of people here want to let CGs get there first.

I'm not here to have my opinions taken with validity. If you like them, that's fine. If not, move on.

However, what I stated about VOIP is a FACT.

It's reminiscent of what happened when cars lost the points and condenser, the carburetor, and suddenly "you can't work on them anymore".

Well, maybe YOU can't. Someone who took the time to learn the new technology instead of griping about it can.

You could leave it at that and be accurate. Most of them..if they can't fix it with a couple clicks of the mouse, it won't be fixed.