POST WRITTEN BYVilas Uchil - Director of network engineering at BullsEye Telecom. Innovating, designing and building a collaborative unified communication network.
Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) phone systems have been omnipresent for the past several decades. The VoIP way of phone service delivery provides tremendous advantages as compared to its predecessor, the legacy-based plain old telephone service (POTs). The key advantages are with regard to user features, better quality of services, ease of service management and integration with other business processes.
As per an FCC report from December 2015, there were 65 million end-user switched access lines in service and 59 million interconnected VoIP subscriptions in the United States. Switched access lines provide a dial tone and are mostly POTs services. Even with known VoIP advantages, businesses in the U.S. have been slow in migrating from POTs to VoIP technology. POTs lines have physical connectivity all the way to the end user premise. VoIP technology uses the internet network for connectivity.
Businesses that want to migrate from POTs to VoIP are concerned about the performance of a VoIP system over the internet where packets compete with other data traffic in the same internet circuit. At BullsEye, we've reviewed the challenges with migrations and also found out another hindrance for a business was adapting to changes in internal processes due to the introduction of new-technology phone systems.
I have been in the telecom carrier world my entire working life, building communication networks and nurturing an army of engineers to deliver unified communication services. I want to share the challenges of conversion of POTs into newer VoIP technology and how the advent of software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN) has provided some of the answers.
Software-Defined Wide-Area Network And VoIP design
The advent of a software-defined wide area network provided the final solution for the quality-of-experience question. The SD-WAN solution works by providing a virtual encrypted pipe (overlays) between the end user and the service provider. The end user now can have multiple internet circuits for redundancy, and the voice calls can now navigate through the circuit that provides the best performance. Virtual overlay with encryption tunneling capability provides the end user with direct connectivity to the service provider’s network. Not all SD-WAN providers can ensure a high quality of experience for their VoIP solutions. Business users should verify that the service provider hosts the SD-WAN centralized gateway at their voice infrastructure. This allows the VoIP packets from the end user's network to be handpicked and routed securely to the service provider’s voice network. This ensures a quality of experience all the way from customer's network to the voice service provider's network.
Machine-To-Machine Use Of POTs Lines
If you are working on a migration strategy for POTs to VoIP, it's important to note that the POTs lines are not just used for phone services. They are also used to service alarm systems, gate/door openers, swimming pool emergency lines, paging systems and elevator phone lines. VoIP providers are quick to sell to customers with their off-the-shelf analog telephone adapter-based VoIP solution. These can work well with regular analog phone systems. However, for machine-to-machine (MTM) communication systems like alarm devices and gate openers, the ATAs can be challenging.
Also, in instances like elevator lines, VoIP solutions require a new set of cables to be run in order to make them work. Applying design thinking concepts will allow you to understand user challenges requiring rewiring work. You may need to work with original equipment manufacturers (OEM) to ensure VoIP endpoints are built to integrate with elevator lines without additional wiring requirements.