Today average customer uses Voice over internet protocol (VoIP) which is latest trend in communication industry. The technology is rapidly advancing because all telecommunication product companies are now investing fund to have more improved VoIP products and services.
This year the VOIP market has picked up. Many corporate have started using VoIP and have realized a large savings of 52-percent or more off their phone bills. Use of wireless VoIP helped hospitals to reduce cost of mobile phones. Technologically VoIP is better than pagers and hence it is getting popular in nursing homes and hospitals.
What are the disadvantages of Voice over Internet Protocol?
VoIP is becoming very popular to business houses but it is still not very popular to residential segment. The qualities of VoIP services are inferior to the quality of call in regular telephone technology due to various reasons.
VOIP technology requires a large amount of data to be compressed and transmitted in a packet format, then uncompressed and delivered, all in a relatively small amount of time. This digitization of analog voice signals takes too long and the callers experience either echo or over-talk.
Regular phone calls function with a delay of no more than ten( 10) milliseconds whereas in the case VOIP the delay is up to 400 milliseconds, meaning that the callers won’t hear each other fast enough to make the conversation flow easily. Due to this delay, either callers will hear themselves talking or they will start talking again before they have heard the other person reply. It is true that this delay problem does not occur for each call.
The disadvantages of VOIP are usually acceptable if the callers are using a free service and the calls are for personal in nature. The degradation of voice quality is not acceptable to corporate houses. Apart from delay in voice conversation, IT security network like firewall sometimes failed to route a VOIP call once it is received.
Moreover, if several people use VoIP, bandwidth utilization also increases. Excess use of bandwidth also increases the infrastructural cost.
By: Arindam Chattopadhyaya
Posts Tagged ‘Voice Quality’
Challenges of VOIP in 2007
March 16th, 2010VoIP Phone Systems – There’s a Fly in the Ointment
February 14th, 2010
The keystone that will lock in VoIP as the successor to TDM technology has yet to be hefted into place. It may in fact take another decade before we see the full potential of VoIP phone systems. The keystone we are referring to is the deployment of standards based IP infrastructure by the public carriers.
VoIP phone systems are seemingly ubiquitous. Sexy new VoIP PBX systems and VoIP business solutions are announced almost every day. The technology is credible and past issues including voice quality have been sorted out. What’s the catch?
The catch is that the benefits realized by users of VoIP business phone systems relate mainly to internal communication. Organizations with distributed national and international operations gain the most from implementing VoIP phone systems. They achieve savings because their internal communication doesn’t go via PSTNs and they achieve significant savings as a consequence. Conversely, organizations that don’t have remote operations, work from home employees or a mobile workforce need to be far more creative in making a business case to justify a VoIP deployment.
The greatest pain for business is associated with external not internal communication. Most businesses have more customers than employees. To service, retain and acquire them a business must make an increasing volume of external phone calls. As most VoIP services interoperate via PSTNs employing TDM technology they are not using end-to-end VoIP services. Before that can happen the carriers must upgrade their infrastructure from TDM to VoIP technology.
Are the carriers about to upgrade their infrastructure any time soon? It’s unlikely. Collectively Tier 1 carriers have an enormous sunken investment in Class 4 and 5 switches. They work just fine and will probably continue to work for at least another decade. No matter how cheap the replacement VoIP gear, its more expensive than hardware that’s already installed and on the balance sheet.
Tier 1 carriers also have an investment in existing business models. These models are based on using TDM infrastructure not packets of data. Change is inevitable, but it always involves risk. The carriers have demonstrated time and again that they are risk averse, at least when it comes to tinkering with their main source of revenue. It’s been a topic of discussion for more than a decade, but there’s little evidence of change.
It’s also significant that there is little or no agreement on standards for carrier VoIP. There are even differences between carriers on how they handle SIP trunking and Caller ID. In the absence of enforceable standards between carriers there is little prospect of reliable VoIP peering between carriers any time soon.
For now and the immediate future, enterprise users of VoIP phone systems must reconcile themselves to enjoying less than fifty percent of the potential upside available from their VoIP business solutions. At some point the carriers will replace their infrastructure and agree on standards for IP-based carrier services, but it may take the entrance of a new breed of carrier before that comes to pass.
By: Chris H Green
