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Anytime, Anywhere With Centralized Management
Another benefit of VoIP systems is that they can be managed from a central location, a boon for any IT department with a small staff. At Amerindo, CTO Alan Peterson is the IT department. He's found that turning phones on and off, moving employees or adding new ones is simple with VoIP. "The best thing about VoIP is that I can do virtually anything with this phone system from virtually anywhere," he says.
Indeed, the anytime, anywhere nature of VoIP is another area where businesses see unexpected benefits. Where traditional phone systems are based on a single location per telephone number, with VoIP, a user's location is irrelevant. As long as there's an Internet connection, users can make and receive calls and e-mails as if they're in the office.
That's worked out well for Kesner at Fenwick & West, which has outfitted its attorneys with wireless VoIP phones so they can take calls when away from their desks. Traveling attorneys have software on their laptops that enable them to make and receive calls -- even access the same directories -- from wireless hot spots as if they were in the office.
This mobility has also proved convenient and cost effective for teams of attorneys who need to work in a courthouse or client site for extended periods of time. Rather than pay for extensive cell phone use, CTO Kesner outfits a team with a call manager switch and 25 phones. Attorneys simply plug the switch into a broadband connection and -- voila! -- they get a remote version of the office phone system, replete with all features, including voicemail. "Our lawyers feel more confident setting up business anyplace in the world," says Kesner.
Cambridge Health Alliance, a $466 million Cambridge, Mass.-based health care organization, has also benefited from VoIP's location independence. The health care group, with three hospitals and 20 clinics, serves a community where people speak 40 languages. The hospital thus employs many interpreters, who could be at any facility at any time and hard to locate.
Robert Lewis, Cambridge's director of network and telecom services, thus created a virtual call center, grouping interpreters on the network. Now, if a doctor needs a Portuguese translator, he dials an extension to reach a dispatcher who can see which interpreter is available and where that person is. The call can then be routed appropriately. "Without question, we could not do this without VoIP," Lewis says.
Despite its growing presence, VoIP is not plug and play, and users need to beware its downsides. To accommodate voice, businesses often need to upgrade their computing networks. Standards are not yet mature, which has slowed competition and limited the choices of handsets. Handsets, which have numerous features, can be confusing for users, and the value of integrating applications can be questionable.
Then there is the quality of the call.
Voice traffic, while not particularly bandwidth-intensive, is sensitive, and for VoIP calls to sound good, IT organizations have to make some adjustments to their networks. Most businesses use a virtual LAN or VLAN to segregate voice traffic, and need switches with quality-of-service (QoS) features to ensure voice calls get priority over data traffic. If packets are delayed on the network, voice quality plummets.
Muzak's Thompson says he had to tinker with his system to get the voice quality right, especially for remote offices with lower bandwidth connections. Amerindo had to upgrade to switches that support Power over Ethernet in order to use its VoIP phones. And Cambridge Health, in the midst of a network upgrade when it deployed VoIP, made sure that all its new switches were QoS-enabled. Still, the organization hedged the VoIP bet and took a hybrid approach, deploying VoIP over its WAN while keeping traditional phone lines inside most of its offices. That way, voice quality is not an issue, and the network has some redundancy in case of a failure.
Lewis says he can't see moving to pure end-to-end VoIP in less than five or 10 years. "When you are involved in saving lives, that is a much different level of criticality," he says.
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