The Internet is calling

Traditional thinking has been that VoIP-Type services for businesses needed to be run over private, dedicated networks rather than across the public internet. But have technological advances made enterprise-grade VoIP and Unified Communication over public networks a reality?

By Simon Hendery

Telstra CEO Sol Trujillo and celebrity Rove McManus were guests of honour at an event in Auckland recently, appearing on stage in front of several hundred ICT professionals at a function put on by Telstra’s kiwi subsidiary, TelstraClear.

The clever thing was neither Trujillo nor McManus were actually in Auckland. They both appeared as life-sized holograms, saving themselves the trouble of flying across the Tasman sea, and giving Telstra the opportunity to showcase what it called the first hologram demonstration of its type in New Zealand. The gimmick helped launch a rebranding of Telstra’s Next IP network across New Zealand, but it also served as a glimpse into the future of business communications.

Okay, it will be a while yet before hologram meetings become a reality, with flow-on effects such as making air travel an unnecessary legacy business activity. But think of the advances in video conferencing over the past few years and you start to get a feeling for what will probably be possible in a few years’ time.

Back to the present day and telcos – including Telstra – are busy promoting the internet protocol (IP) transformation happening across their networks. They say IP allows organisations to take advantage of a lot more clever applications related to unified communications (UC) and business productivity.

The IP fear factor
But are businesses holding back from embracing the technology’s potential because of fears – either real or unfounded – that if they want to go IP they need to do it over their own private networks rather than using the public internet option?

“We see less resistance because of that type of mentality now,” says Steve Woff, UC business manager at NEC.

He says while businesses previously worried about capacity constraints over the internet, that is now less of a concern for many.

“A while back everyone wanted to lease their lines – even before VoIP we were leasing lines to customers for just their own traffic. Now everywhere bandwidth is starting to really expand at great rates, so there is a lot more bandwidth and a lot less fear of that.” Woff says the popularity of consumer VoIP (voice-over-IP) services like Skype has also helped change attitudes.

“A lot of the home-based technology, where people are using Skype or MSN to talk, has started to build confidence that you can actually have a conversation across the public internet and you can get good quality audio across it. So people are a little less sceptical now that they can actually use cheaper services, or in some cases free services, to run their calls for their business,” he says.

“Like all things you always have the choice, so you might decide to run your SIP-based calls across the internet for branch-to-branch, where it may not be so important, but for a critical customer you might force it out a TDM line or something else. Customers are always in control and they can make those choices themselves.”

Answering capacity concerns
Gurpreet Ghuliani, Telstra’s group manager for hosted voice, says while applications like Skype are fine as a consumer tool, they don't work as a shared resource. Business customers tend not to want to rely on pooled capacity when it comes to something as mission-critical to their operation as telephony.

The good news for businesses is that these days a growing number of telco providers are offering cheaper service options with quality of service commitments, so, for example, if a business knows it needs guaranteed capacity at any one time for, say 40 phone lines, that can be worked into an agreement with the provider.

“The investment we’re making into our Next IP network means that we’re setting up a platform to deliver a range of applications, and voice is just another application in this new IP world – that’s what it's come down to,” says Ghuliani.

“The value we’re trying to provide into the market is how you control voice – for example getting voicemail emailed to you or turning on the ability to have three phones that you can nominate to ring at the same time [when a call comes in]. That’s the added value that we incorporate into our voice services,” he says.

“We like to think of IP telephony as one of the cornerstones of unified communications. Because what IP tel is really about – and this is the thing you can’t get over the internet right now – is the ability to take that voice application and integrate it into business applications.

“The ability of a business to click-to-call, or link an incoming call to whatever database they have, that sort of stuff small businesses haven’t [to date] had access to. It’s been the domain of large enterprise and has required a large investment in integration. What IP is doing is bringing that all down to small businesses, letting them have those tools and in theory making them a lot more efficient and effective.”

Ghuliani says businesses – both large and small – are picking up on the productivity benefits of having unified communication tools.

“The key drivers at the moment are the ability to integrate it with your backend applications – either ERP or CRM, or the ability to go into Outlook and click-to-dial – and also just managing telephony services in a more real-time manner,” Ghuliani says. “I think we’ve moved a lot in the past three to four years. We’re seeing market demand rather than us trying to sell the story now.”

He adds that market demand has also been assisted by software developers picking up on the benefits of integrating smart telephony capabilities into their solutions.

“We’re seeing a larger awareness from small business, not just driven by telcos, but also driven by third-party application providers. For example Salesforce.com are saying we can give you these sort of tools if you want, and if you want click-to-dial functionality from a button on your screen, you can get that done.”

Sweating the WAN asset
Outside of the telco’s infrastructure, organisations with wide area networks are, not surprisingly, interested in taking advantage of these private networks for voice and other types of communication, including video, where possible.

Roger Geerts, director of systems engineering at Juniper Networks, says security is an area the company focuses on a lot with customers.

“Security seems to be an after-thought in many cases,” he says.

“But if you think about it up front and design your voice network using some of the virtualisation techniques that are available you can make your VoIP deployment very resilient and very secure. Both are important given that there are more and more VoIP attacks appearing on the horizon.”

A customer example cited by Juniper is De Bortoli Wines, which wanted to improve its WAN performance for voice and application traffic, including mission-critical ERP data, across a frame relay network connecting seven sites across Australia.

Most of De Bortoli’s facilities are located in rural areas, where terrestrial links are expensive and susceptible to latency problems. This meant that increasing bandwidth across the frame relay network was not only prohibitively expensive, it would also not necessarily improve the consistency and timely delivery of the company’s applications and voice traffic.

So instead De Bortoli deployed Juniper WAN optimisation equipment on its WAN links. This increased the company’s WAN capacity by more than 2.5 times on average, with a peak increase of more than 70 percent, ensuring consistent and accelerated performance for their ERP and voice applications. This solution also allowed the company to avoid expensive and disruptive network upgrades. Based on estimated costs for the WAN link upgrades, De Bortoli will realise complete returns on their investment in less than nine months.

“It has meant that we will not have to upgrade our network for at least another two years,” says De Bortoli IT manager, Bill Robertson.

Beyond the hype
Meanwhile, NEC’s Woff says regardless of the type of network it is deployed over, VoIP is now a mature technology, and the evidence for that is in the fact that virtually every phone system sold today is IP-based.

“I think people are getting confidence from the fact that all the manufacturers are pushing these technologies,” Woff says.

“And they are reliable – we have phone systems out there running five-nines availability. Be they TDM or IP it doesn’t really matter – the actual call platforms now are considerably more reliable now than they were,” he says.

“The networks that people are embedding into their businesses are now much more reliable than they were. All these things added together are giving businesses confidence that they can run over VoIP – it’s not just the marketing hype that it was five years ago.”

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