Q. What are the major hurdles in adopting VoIP?
©2013 Analicomm, Inc., Coumbus, Ohio
of 13
The first issue is reliability. Over the years, user expectations have
been shaped by traditional telephone systems which frequently provide
five 9 reliability (99.999%). This reliability is accomplished through
hardware redundancy. VoIP systems can be equally reliable, but they can
also be unreliable, depending on the performance level of the network.
VoIP requires having sufficient “resiliency” available in the network to
provide comparable reliability.
The second issue is network readiness. Network readiness looks at
whether your hardware is equipped to support Virtual Private Networks
(VPN) and Quality of Service (QoS). While not mandatory, life is much
better if your switches support Power over Ethernet (PoE). But, the key to
network readiness is how much throughput your network can actually
support. This is a point-to-point assessment where bad cable
terminations, miss-matched patch cords or anything else that can
increase electrical resistance needs to be addressed.
The third issue is traffic management. Traffic here means the orderly
flow of packets through the network. The current network and its
configuration has evolved to support the data traffic that exits. What will
happen when a load of additional voice traffic is dumped on the network?
For most organizations the answer to this question is: “We don’t know!”
[Note: If the present telephone system has a call recording system, and it
can be set to collect all calls, it is possible to develop a quantitative
answer to the question that can identify in advance, if changes are
needed.]
