VoIP Conferencing in HD voice

Beyond the cost savings, VoIP can bring tremendous benefits to any business organization right out-of-the-box. Because it is an application based on the Internet, it has a certain flexibility and customizability that the traditional PSTN system simply cannot match. One example is conferencing. With a regular telephone system, this can be a complicated process that requires a lot of workarounds. VoIP on the other hand includes this as a standard feature and any self-respecting SIP provider will be able to implement it. Depending on your specific VoIP plan, there may be different pricing options and models. But the basic idea is the same.

You are allowed to have a “room” that people can dial into in order to start the conference call. Again, depending on the implementation by a service provider, there will be a maximum number of allowed participants. But basic conferencing capabilities aside, one of the truly useful features of a VoIP system is the ability to conduct the entire session in HD voice.

Regular telephone systems sample your voice at a frequency of 8 kHz. While this can be sufficient for our basic purposes, it is achieved at the cost of truncation of the higher and lower frequencies. This results in a loss of quality but allows the bandwidth to be sufficiently small for easy communication. Unfortunately, this leads to many humorous situations where a person is trying to spell their name for instance and has to specifically use a different standard so as not to confuse “P” with “B” and “D”. While this may be annoying, the problem becomes multiplied when there are many more people in a conference room. With regular PSTN call quality, it can also become difficult to distinguish individual voices. Needless to say, this causes unnecessary confusion and hinders productivity.

VoIP can make use of superior quality codecs with a 16 kHz sampling rate and can go even higher. The improvements in broadband connections throughout the US have made it easy for anyone to participate in HD quality VoIP calls. To truly benefit from the call quality, the receiver should be specially designed to transmit the voice data as it is received. Specialized VoIP phones implement this and can deliver a superior experience of call quality.

Contact your hosted VoIP provider to find out what kind of conference facilities they offer and how they price it. Some of them will offer you a “pay-as-you-go” package, while others will include it in their regular services with the possibility to expand the functionality if necessary.

VoIP and Battery Life

Mobile VoIP is one of the fastest-growing types of Internet traffic. This trend is unlikely to slow down in the future. If anything, we will see it accelerate. As more and more people begin to use VoIP on their smartphones, they will start to realize that you can drain your battery very quickly if you’re not careful. This is because VoIP uses the Internet to make calls and there are at least two modes of Internet connectivity on any smartphone – Wi-Fi and wireless radio.

It’s a fair bet to say that most of the time you’ll be using VoIP indoors in either a business environment or at your home. Both of these places are most likely to have fast and free Wi-Fi available. This is perfect for VoIP calling because Wi-Fi is reliable with a strong signal and doesn’t suffer from latency, jitter, or lag. But what’s the use of a smartphone if it’s shackled indoors? To use it outside, the wireless data network is extremely critical. Talking in your car, or in restaurants or anywhere outside necessitates a good wireless data connectivity. Both of these networks together on all the time can take a toll on battery life.

There’s another complication. It also conserve battery, most modern smartphone operating systems turn off Wi-Fi when the device is sleeping. However this means that if you receive a call during that time your phone will not ring. So you need a mechanism to keep Wi-Fi on. This “Wi-Fi lock” can be implemented in a variety of ways but there’s no doubt that it will drain your battery faster.

What we really need is a smartphone that switches its networks on and off depending on what is available. In other words, as soon as you step out of Wi-Fi range the device should turn it off. And when you’re at home or in your office with Wi-Fi available, the wireless data network needs to be turned off. This technology isn’t easily available right now but it’s a fair bet to say that as more and more people become aware of the issues involved, applications catering to these requirements will turn up.

More interestingly, we need to have a system where calls are automatically transferred over networks without a break so that when we are transitioning from indoors to outdoors, the Wi-Fi network hands over the calls to the wireless data network. This requires a specialized hardware and software and only a few devices on the market have this capability.

A lot will also depend on advances in battery technology. But as of now, it’s worth being aware of the issues involved when making the switch to an SIP provider.

Geography is Meaningless

The traditional PSTN phone system has long been held hostage to geographical considerations. In fact, we have gotten used to thinking of people in other countries as “far away” even though from a practical standpoint you might be as unlikely to visit the person living in even the next state. A lot of this attitude has to do with the thinking that goes along with the higher costs of keeping in touch using the regular telephone system. In today’s age of the Internet however, there is no reason to have this curious dichotomy. With VoIP, the whole world is one.

For businesses, keeping in touch with overseas partners can be an extremely expensive proposition. Constant communication with stakeholders such as employees, suppliers, and dealers is a must for effective operations. Bills can easily run up to several thousands of dollars every month. VoIP can cut down on these costs dramatically and with the proper management can even remove them completely. This is because the technology makes use of the Internet to transfer voice data across continents without any charge and only drops down to the local loop of the telephone network when absolutely necessary.

If you’re able to get your entire organization as well as the stakeholders on board using the same VoIP system, you can communicate with each other for free entirely over the Internet and pay no charges whatsoever. In this case, it will function pretty much like e-mail or chat messaging – just using voice data instead of text.

One of the biggest threats to the full-fledged development of VoIP services is the fact that different providers do not allow interconnections. This is in contradiction to the existing phone system where the telephone number acts as the “glue” that binds together the various carriers. A person using AT&T can easily connect to another using Verizon. As far as VoIP is concerned, the SIP protocol is the only thing that comes even remotely close to being a standard. VoIP services such as Vonage use a modified version of SIP to prevent outgoing and incoming calls from other SIP providers. This is harmful to the general progress of VoIP since it forces people to rely on using telephone numbers instead.

Perhaps as time passes by and VoIP becomes more and more prevalent, the demand for greater interconnectivity between VoIP services will grow. Only then will we be able to have a truly global VoIP network. But even so, VoIP has already rendered geographical locations pretty much irrelevant. In short, the future can only get better from here.

VoIP Network Configuration

One of the great things about a business hosted VoIP system is that you don’t have to set up any of the infrastructure by yourself. All of the heavy lifting and capital expenditure is done by the third-party service provider whose job it is to maintain and upgrade the VoIP network. However, your own Internet connectivity and local network can make a big difference to the quality of VoIP you experience.

If you have even a halfway competent IT administrator, configuring the local LAN network to accommodate VoIP should be a breeze. Already most manufacturers of routers have built in Quality of Service or QoS rules that give preferential treatment to real-time P2P traffic like VoIP and online gaming. With a few tweaks, you can easily ensure that you receive the maximum mileage from your VoIP service to prevent it from getting choked off by other traffic.

How you setup your network will depend greatly on the manner in which you use VoIP. If you’re an individual customer, a little bit of caution on your part is enough. Just make sure that you don’t have any massive downloads in progress that are hogging up all the bandwidth and you’re pretty much set. These days most broadband connections in the United States have more than sufficient space to accommodate the meager data needs of VoIP. So its not really a problem in the home environment.

Businesses on the other hand are an entirely different ballgame. There is not one, but dozens and possibly even hundreds of people who need access to VoIP. Even though only a small fraction of them will be using it concurrently, the trends need to be analyzed and the bandwidth plan for accommodating them needs to be laid down. For this purpose, you need to set up a VLAN that is a dedicated virtual network running on top of your existing one that has a preset amount of bandwidth for VoIP. Other applications that use the Internet cannot intrude upon it.

Contact an SIP provider and ask them to collaborate with your IT administrator to find out how much bandwidth you need to set aside for this purpose. This limit needs to be reviewed periodically to take into account changes in work styles, more bandwidth usage, and growth in the employee workforce.

With a little bit of management and foresight, your hosted VoIP installation will give you unprecedented business flexibility, lower your costs, and dramatically improve the efficiency of your operations.

Is the Internet Ready to Replace the PSTN System?

Setting up a telephone network requires a huge investment in time and money. You also ned significant political influence in order to obtain the contracts necessary to string your infrastructure all over the country. Because of this, it’s hardly surprising that there is barely any competition in the market today. There are a handful of competitors most of whom collude with each other to keep the market as it is. Only a few outliers who are at risk of losing their market share are trying something new. T-Mobile is a prime example of this with its recent move to end phone contracts and separate the device from the service.

They say that established and entrenched industries always fear innovation. This must be the reason why telecom companies have been so hostile to VoIP in the past. Ranging from regulatory threats to outright banning the applications from the app stores. Fortunately these tactics haven’t worked and VoIP is now enjoying a huge and growing market share.

But is the Internet ready to act as a replacement for the reliable phone network? The answer is “it depends”. Under certain situations, using VoIP is every bit as reliable as a regular phone system. If you’re using Skype on a PC with a wired ethernet connection, the call will be crystal clear (provided of course the other person has a similarly reliable connection). But even when using VoIP applications on a smartphone, having a Wi-Fi connection available is just as good as any telephone. It’s fast, and doesn’t have an acceptable lags or delays.

But if you’re using VoIP over a wireless mobile data network such as 2G, 3G, or 4G, you are apt to experience some jitter or latency. This is because these networks haven’t yet come up to scratch for real-time applications – at least not to the extent that VoIP requires. For two people to talk to each other, the most delay that we have come to expect is say 150 ms. And that includes the complete round-trip time with all the latency and delay of the intervening network. This means that the local loop lag has to be significantly lower. And as of now, we haven’t yet been able to devise a mobile data network that works flawlessly especially when the coverage itself is somewhat spotty.

Contact your local SIP provider to find out about various VoIP solutions for your business. It’s easy to get started and requires no initial capital expenditure. You can reuse your existing land lines by simply connecting them to an ATA adapter to modify digital signals into analog and vice versa.

Designing a Migration Strategy for VoIP

A smoothly running business is always wary of changes to the system, and for good reason. When something is working properly, changing it is always a risk even when it costs more and is somewhat inefficient as compared to the alternatives. For a business, this could mean loss of revenue and opportunities. Which is why when migrating to a VoIP system – whether a hosted one or an in-house implementation – it is important to handle this transition with a migration strategy that slowly phases out the old system in order to work out any possible kinks.

Of course, the strategy will depend to a great extent on what type of VoIP solution the business is about to implement. Having VoIP and the PSTN network work side-by-side for a while allows the management to get a better insight into the differences between the two and to directly compare the costs against each other. Technical issues can be smoothed out without a sense of urgency since there is always the backup of the existing network. But more than that, VoIP necessitates a change in the way we think about communications, and it is this aspect of the implementation that the company will need to build as much as possible in order to truly leverage the benefits.

By initially asking for volunteers and providing VoIP services to a select few, you can begin to inculcate new ways of working such as allowing a single number to service multiple devices and having voicemail delivered to your inbox instead. The idea is to create a test bed that analyzes the impact of VoIP efficiency on a person’s work. Other employees witnessing these changes might opt for inclusion into the program as well and it is desirable to reach a certain critical mass before phasing out the old PSTN system entirely.

Introducing new technology into a workplace can be fraught with difficulty especially when it impacts something so integral as communications that everyone already has a smooth workflow with. Don’t let this new initiative be derailed by poor management. With the proper migration strategy, you can minimize the disruption to your business as well as leverage the most powerful benefits of VoIP in order to improve workplace efficiency and lower costs.

Contact a local hosted PBX VoIP service to find out how easy it is to get started with minimal investments and using the existing hardware that you have. If on the other hand you have a in house IP PBX system, converting it to a full-fledged VoIP network is easy as well.

Unlocking the Smartphone

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act or the DMCA makes certain actions such as bypassing Digital security protections illegal. There are several exceptions to this rule and so far, unlocking one’s phone has always been one of them. The reason is simple – people own their own phones. They purchased it fair and square and so should be able to do whatever they like with it including using it with another service. Unlocking a smart phone breaks its shackles and allows the user to pop in any SIM card of their choice. At a technical level, unlocking falls afoul of the DMCA and should be illegal. But every three years, exceptions are granted. Some time ago, Apple was extremely concerned about the jail breaking of its devices and sought to legalize it via the DMCA. This attempt was unsuccessful and an exception was created for the same. It seems however that lobbying groups have been successful and it has not been renewed this time over.

Predictably there has been a great deal of outrage over the move and the tech community has come together to strongly condemn it. Fortunately, it seems that the FCC is taking an interest as it has done so often in the past to protect consumer’s rights. It is unclear as to whether or not the FCC possesses the authority to challenge this ban on unlocking your smartphone and it is in the process of filing an appeal to determine the scope of its power. The chairman of the FCC Julius Genachowski has made it clear what his opinions on the matter are. There is no doubt the FCC thinks that every customer should have the right to use the hardware that they have purchased with any service provider.

The penalties for breaking a provision of the DMCA is jail time for five years and a fine of $500,000. This is an outrageous amount. Many have said that it is primarily aimed at wholesale distributors selling phones in the gray market, but that is no reason to deny users the freedom to use their phone with any service of their choice. This is turning out to be a hot button issue in the technology world and when the smoke clears we will have a better idea of what the future is going to look like and whether or not the government supports the right of people to own the hardware that they paid for.

Disparate VoIP Apps

The mobile VoIP scene today is completely cluttered with a wide variety of applications that can neither inter communicate, nor are they even aware of each other’s existence. These are mostly targeted towards individual customers. Applications like WhatsApp, Viber, and even Facebook’s latest VoIP solutions are all based on locking in their userbase. In a way it makes strategic sense. Why would you build a system that allows you to move out of it? If your friends are on a particular network, they want you to come into it as well.

But that’s not the way communication technologies should work. The PSTN phone system is an excellent example of a framework that spans geographies, companies, and even varying backend technologies. Anyone in the world can talk to another person with a telephone number regardless of location or device. In the long run, if we want Internet calling to become the dominant mode of communication, we will simply have to find a way to break the barriers to communication that currently exists between VoIP apps. A person on Skype should be able to talk to a person using WhatsApp or Viber.

It sounds like a pipe dream, and it probably is. There’s no way application developers are going to open up their networks to each other even if they use the same technology. It’s a business decision. But there is one sphere in which intercommunication is possible – the SIP world.

SIP is a standards based VoIP protocol that relies on a simple addressing system – one that looks just like a regular email ID. The true power of email lies in its ubiquity. A system where everyone can send a message to another person regardless of who their Internet provider is, which email service they’re using and what computer they check their messages from. The SIP protocol models itself on the email system with a few key changes that reflect the underlying technological variances. VoIP is a real time protocol unlike email which is sent and read at different times.

But it’s a work in progress and every person who signs up with an SIP VoIP provider is expanding the network. Using the SIP address provided to you, you can talk to anyone else with the same for free no matter where they are. It’s just like sending an email in fact. The entire operation takes place over the Internet using P2P technology. It’ll revolutionize communications as we know it.

But will it ever happen? Will isolated VoIP applications give up their grip on their users and allow them the freedom to smoothly cross their barriers? Probably not.

VoIP Regulation by the FCC

A short while ago I had written about how the FCC was mulling over regulating the VoIP industry. I explained how there were two sides to the coin and that regulation could hinder the VoIP industry by imposing outdated rules meant for the legacy telecommunications system and at the same time benefit it by laying down some ground rules for how the telecom carriers should treat VoIP traffic. Recently the FCC confirmed its plans to regulate VoIP. Going beyond the mere “antidiscrimination” laws, there are still a large number of things that can be done to improve the VoIP industry and that would only benefit customers. Here are some of them.

The first on the list is 911 calling. Currently, VoIP users do not have the full protection of this vital emergency service. One of the reasons of course is that it is impossible to determine a person’s location by looking at their VoIP telephone number as compared to the traditional PSTN one. So far, this necessitated SIP VoIP service providers to allow their customers to manually fill in their address so that in an emergency no time is wasted. The FCC rules will however formalize these guidelines so that every VoIP user has equal access to this service.

Perhaps more important will be rules forcing VoIP providers to work together. Currently, VoIP services are in a state of disconnect. There are many different VoIP “islands” that are sealed off from each other and who can only communicate amongst themselves using the PSTN phone network as an intermediary. VoIP rules formalized by the FCC might transform the industry overnight by mandating some kind of interconnectivity between VoIP providers. This makes sense. Imagine if an AT&T customer could only talk to others using the same service – not to one on Verizon or Sprint. While the FCC should refrain from imposing any specific technological standards on the VoIP industry due to its rapidly evolving nature, certain basic guidelines in order to ensure that the industry develops as fast as possible will be tremendously beneficial.

Of course as mentioned before, these rules should also force telecom carriers to treat VoIP traffic in a nondiscriminatory way even though it may compete with their core business interests. Personally I am in favor of a broader “Internet neutrality” legislation, but this is a good starting point.

Let’s hope that the FCC’s actions in this regard are beneficial and do not proved to be a hindrance.

Content Providers Pay

We’re seeing a new phase in the evolution of the Internet where governments are eager to take a bigger hand in its architecture and business model. In my opinion, this is a grave mistake and threatens one of the greatest inventions of mankind in the modern generation. We also saw a bid for a take over at the recent UN convention by the ITU trying to exert its jurisdiction over the Internet by virtue of being a telecommunications body. Fortunately, much of the world was able to unite against such a proposal mainly due to protests from regular individuals like us.

But there is another threat that is currently being played out in the European Union that would set a horrible precedent for the future. And that is the principle of “content provider pays”. The idea is that telecommunication companies are upset that companies like Google and Facebook are using up so much of their bandwidth. They want them to pay extra for it completely ignoring the fact that it is customers who choose to utilize their services and that the customer has already paid for bandwidth being delivered to their home regardless of where it comes from and what kind of traffic it is.

If such a system is put in place, it could severely threaten new and innovative technologies like hosted VoIP. It’s nobody’s guess that this is just a money grab. Telecommunication companies are worried about declining revenues and are eager to make up for it in some other way. Imagine what would happen to a VoIP like service that directly threatens the very core of their offerings. If this precedent is allowed to be set, we can fully expect additional violations of net neutrality penalizing traffic competing with core offerings of the telcos.

The Internet has been a tremendous success with the way this has democratized the creation and distribution of content. As a smalltime blogger, I able to provide access to the entire world if you choose to visit my blog. Instituting a mechanism of making content providers pay extra for traffic delivered to customers would completely destroy the progress we have made in this regard. Content providers already pay for hosting and bandwidth. Some of the larger ones spend fortunes on maintaining their infrastructure. This business model has worked well so far and the only people who want to “fix” it are those whose traditional business models are being disrupted by the Internet.

Let us hope that these proposals are defeated in the European Union and never see the light of day in countries such as the US.