When Your Broadband Isn’t Stable Enough For VoIP Phones

By: John Shepler

People may point and laugh when you tell them your phones are still on analog landlines. Do you have to crank the phone or spin the dial? Very funny… especially when it turns out the joke is on them.

Those old twisted pair lines were designed to have decent voice quality and rock solid stability. Yes, they can degrade with time. That usually shows up as noise on the line until you can’t make or receive calls. After a quick service call, everything is back in order for another year or two or a decade.

Oh, but that’s so old fashioned. The new phone line is the Internet. You can ditch the separate wiring and expensive line to the phone company when your computers and telephones share the same broadband connection. You can also get more advanced features, such as phones and computers that work together to support customers.

The only real hitch is that sometimes the new phones don’t measure up to the old phones. Oh, the handsets are great. They’re marvels of electronic engineering. Somewhere, somehow, the performance is getting lost. Calls may start out fine and then get garbled. The distortion can be so bad you can’t understand the caller. Worst case the call gets dropped…. and you slam that fancy handset back in the cradle. Not too hard, though. Those phones are expensive.

Where It All Goes So Wrong
The problem with VoIP or Voice over Internet Protocol telephony isn’t the fundamental digital technology. It’s that Internet thing. The Internet serves everyone, goes everywhere and is cheap as chips, as they say. Anyone and everyone is online doing pretty much everything possible. Your phone call goes into the fray like every other session and winds up at your VoIP service provider. It’s also completely democratic. Your call is no more or less important than somebody streaming a movie or placing an online order.

What you may not realize is that your old phone calls were really dedicated private connections between you and the party you are talking to. The line itself from your building to the phone company is just a pair of wires that go all the way there. A switching system then connects your line to the other party’s line. You have a dedicated circuit for the duration of the call. If the system gets overloaded, the next caller gets a busy signal. On the Internet, nobody gets a busy signal. The system simply slows down or drops bits. That’s what wrecks nice clean phone conversations.

Is There a Way to Make it Better?
The fundamental problem is more bits per second than a connection can handle. First, stop letting your computers and phones fight for the bandwidth. Set your router up to give phone calls priority. Whatever they don’t use can serve the other equipment. If those operations don’t have enough left over, you are going to have to order a higher bandwidth line.

Another thing to know is that the first mile is the worst mile for an Internet connection. The core of the Internet has much higher performance than most local Internet Service Providers. The cheaper the connection, the more likely it is that you’ll be in contention with other users. Dump the shared bandwidth services like cable and cellular broadband in favor of a dedicated Internet connection, like a T1 line. The 1.5 Mbps bandwidth of T1 is probably not going to meet your other needs, so consider this just for the phones. Otherwise get a higher bandwidth service for everything using Carrier Ethernet over copper or fiber.

Get Off The Internet
If you really want to get control of call quality, replicate the old dedicated phone line but with newer technology. What you need is a dedicated line service from your company to your phone service provider. Most PBX systems can use a T1 line, ISDN PRI (another flavor of T1), or a SIP Trunk. SIP Trunking is designed to directly support VoIP telephony.

Note that these dedicated lines go directly from point to point. There is no Internet connection involved.

If you want to tie together several business locations, an MPLS network may be cost advantageous. This is like a private Internet. The difference is that the line quality is carefully maintained by the service provider and is not the free-for-all you get on the Internet. Does it cost more? You bet. It may well be worth it, though, for customer satisfaction and employee productivity.

Are you frustrated with the quality of your phone service or the performance of your entire network? It’s time to take a look at voice and data connections that will get the job done and probably save you more money than they cost.

Is Connection Latency Important to Your Business?

By: John Shepler

We may be inclined to think that connection speed is the most important consideration for private lines and Internet access. If web pages are loading slowly and files take forever to move, then clearly the network is starved for bandwidth. Just order more Mbps or even Gbps and everything will straighten out, right? Sometimes, yes. Sometimes no. There is another network consideration that can affect your business big time. That is latency.

What Does Latency Mean?
Latency is a time lag. Nothing happens instantaneously, but if the time lag is short enough it will seem that way. You know the expression, “in the blink of an eye”? That’s low latency.

In computing, you experience latency as applications that just don’t keep up with what you are doing. If you press a key and it doesn’t appear on the screen for a split second, you’ve got latency. If you type a command and nothing happens for a second, that’s latency.

When operating on local area networks and in-house data centers, latency may not be all that noticeable. Programs are responsive. Video is nice and smooth. Files move quickly. If the system can keep up with you, latency just isn’t an issue.

When Latency is Noticeable
You often get your first taste of latency when you connect to the Internet or the cloud. Suddenly things seem to be a tad sluggish. It gets destructive when the system is so slow to respond that it interrupts your workflow. You almost feel like you’ve gone back to the days of batch processing where you submit a program and wait for the results to print out.

Worst case latency shows up in real-time processes. VoIP telephony gets a bad name when latency exceeds a hundred milliseconds or two. On a phone call, you expect to carry on a normal conversation. That includes both sides talking at once sometimes. If you ask a question and don’t get a response immediately, you might start taking agin. Right then, you hear the other person’s response just as you say something else. It quickly becomes intolerable. If you are stuck with the situation, you can work around it by consciously taking turns, like you would with a two-way radio.

Higher Bandwidth, Lower Latency
One cause of latency is network traffic jams or congestion. In any size WAN pipe, expressed by bandwidth in Mbps or Gbps, you can only send so many packets per second. If you try to send more, they pile up in a transmission buffer or, worse, get dropped. The fix for this type of latency problem is to simply add more capacity. If your T1 line is full, a 10 Mbps Ethernet line may be way more than enough. Likewise you may really need 100 Mbps or a full Gigabit per second for the connection to appear transparent.

Another way to relieve latency-induced madness is to prioritize traffic. Real time processes like VoIP telephony and teleconferencing take highest priority and can work great on even limited capacity lines. As long as there is still some bandwidth left, you should prioritize business applications in the cloud next and file transfers and backups last. If you run out of bandwidth so that the lowest level processes never finish or take forever, you need to add more bandwidth, pure and simple.

Higher Bandwidth, Same Latency
What happens if you increase your bandwidth by 10x or 100x and nothing improves? “Hello, is this line working?”

With congestion relieved, something else must be slowing things down. Remember that latency is simply a time delay between transmission and reception and that nothing happens instantly. Signals can move only as fast as the speed of light, which even at 186,000 miles per second turns out to be 186 miles per millisecond. If both ends of the connection are 1,860 miles apart, you’ve got a built-in transmission time of 10 mSec each way or 20 msec total. If you need lower latency than this you’ll just have to move closer.

Know that light through fiber optic cable and transmission equipment may impose an additional penalty over a third more than ideal latency. Still not a big problem, as latencies in the tens of millisecond range are not bothersome for nearly all processes. But, what if that connection goes to a geosynchronous satellite? Now you are talking maybe 500 msec round trip. That’s most definitely noticeable and probably a show-stopper for most phone calls and some cloud services. This is why the new Low Earth Orbit satellite constellations are so eagerly anticipated. At distances of a few hundred miles up instead of thousands, latency can be back to nearly fiber optic line performance.

Other latency issues can be traced to network equipment that isn’t working correctly or the inherent nature of the good old Internet. Remember that the Internet was designed by the defense department to be robust and not particularly efficient. Packet routing can take long and convoluted paths and suffer various levels of congestion within the Internet. If you are using a shared bandwidth service, such as cable broadband, DSL, satellite or cellular broadband, other users can clog the link and up goes your latency. Even more maddening, performance can vary from minute to minute so you have no consistency. Dedicated direct connections to your cloud provider can dramatically improve performance if this is your problem.

Are you having network performance issues, especially if you’ve recently moved from an in-house data center to the cloud? Your cloud service can be working perfectly well even though it seems to drag. You might be surprised by ping testing your line and discovering that it is the weak link in the system. Find out now what low latency bandwidth options are available and what it costs to upgrade and relieve your performance issues.

VXSuite Takes the Scary Out of VoIP

By: John Shepler

You know that Unified Communications based on VoIP telephony is the future of business communications. You also know that it is likely a good UC solution can improve the productivity of your business. You’ve been hesitating, though, because ripping everything out and moving to the new technology is downright scary. The phones work fine on their old twisted pair wiring. Well, if by fine you mean you can make and receive calls on your desk phones. That’s pretty much the end of the road for analog and TDM technology. If you want more, you’ll have to make the leap to IP networking all the way around.

Not So Fast...
Oh, but you’ve heard horror stories about companies merging their phones onto the computer network. All of sudden, voices get distorted, calls get dropped. Who wants that? Perhaps it’s better just to stay old school and let somebody else take on the new technology.

Can You Afford Not To?
OK, but you are also letting them take the profits that come with the increased efficiency of having your business apps, desk phones, smartphones, video conferencing, and call center all on one integrated system. Wait long enough and your competitors responsiveness will improve so much that they’ll run circles around your company and start siphoning off customers, then employees.

Looking Under the Hood
What if there were tools that could take the guesswork out of implementing VoIP and UC on your network? Most of the issues you’ll encounter arise from the fact that a network set up for computers can work just fine for file transfers but be a disaster when it comes to handling real-time apps like voice and video. You need to protect those interactive streams from getting crushed by mountains of data moving around. To do that you need to look inside the network and see what is happening.


VXSuite is a toolset ideally qualified to analyze your currenct legacy network and report if you have bandwidth, latency, jitter or congestion issues that will make a mess out of VoIP. You’ll need to implement class of service on your network so that each type of packet stream has the priority and other characteristics it needs to perform optimally.

Before the Move
First, use VXSuite to analyze your system before your make any changes. VXSuite will report on your current voice call volume and usage. It uses that data to calculated min, max and average bandwidth requirements that will support VoIP when you switch. Find and fix problems here and you’ll have a much smoother transition.

A Quality of Experience Assessment is an automated test that deploys software agents on your network to create VoIP test calls to see what bottlenecks arise. Each test call is analyzed for delay, jitter & packet loss and then assigned an MOS score that indicates the quality of the voice communications.

After the Move
Once you deploy your new VoIP and/or UC system, you are not left in the dark. VXSuite monitors call quality and network issues during the rollout phase that can include both VoIP and legacy PBX systems simultaneously. You’ll get reports on how things are working and alarms if there is trouble.

Continuing Support
As ongoing support, the VXSuite cloud-based analytics toolkit continues to monitor your network environment to ensure that voice quality is maintained and issues diagnosed and resolved. You can set threshold levels for delay, jitter, packet loss, MOS, CPU utilization, memory utilization and so on to enable your IT staff to know instantly when problems develop. No more worrying that trouble is sneaking up behind you.

The Toolset You Really Need
Have you been putting off making the technology changes you should because you are worried that things will get worse, not better, when you make the move to VoIP and Unified Communications? If so, now’s the time to get more information about how VXSuite tools and cloud based communications
can improve your productivity and likely reduce cost at the same time.

ShoreTel Connect CLOUD Goes Way Beyond VoIP

By: John Shepler

VoIP phone systems are often seen as a one for one replacement for traditional analog business phones combined with Key Telephone and PBX systems. Reasons to make the switch to newer technology include removing the need for separate telephone and computer networks and the option to outsource the in-house switching system to the cloud. In fact, switching to IP phones opens the door to a much richer set of features, now commonly referred to as Unified Communications (UC).

ShorTel has been a leader in enterprise communications. ShorTel phones are common in companies large and small. ShorTel is also a leader in UC, with its ShorTel Connect CLOUD service. Here is a brief overview:


It’s important to emphasize that ShorTel Connect CLOUD is a fully hosted and managed communications solution that takes the monkey of telephone system management off your back, while adding new capabilities. These include Instant Messaging, video, desktop sharing, and conference calling.

In addition, you can integrate Customer Relationship Management (CRM) applications such as Salesforce and NetSuite to improve employee productivity. Automation is a key ability that’s offered by Unified Communications and presents a strong argument for upgrading from traditional telephony-only analog and VoIP systems.

Cloud-based UC offers some other efficiency advantages. First, you trade capital expenditures for pay-as-you-go monthly billing on a per-seat basis. At first glance, this might seem like six of one / half dozen of another. That is, until the need to scale up or down appears. Add more employees? Just add more seats to your existing system. No need to go out and make a major capital investment in a new PBX mainframe. Business in a downturn? Just reduce the amount of resources to match your resized organization.

These are the same arguments used for cloud computing, and for a good reason. Conceptually, the cloud works the same regardless of what application is hosted. Is voice just another app on cloud? Yes, with the caveat that real time streams such as audio and video require special prioritization to ensure quality of service.

Reliability and security are other major concerns with cloud-based systems. ShorTel offers enterprise-grade performance backed by strong Service Level Agreements (SLAs). Easy access to customer service is also provided as a managed system.

Are you feeling limited by your business telephone system and concerned that you are missing out on the productivity enhancements and cost savings offered by cloud-hosted Unified Communications systems? Find out what ShoreTel Connected CLOUD can offer you.

The 3 Types of VoIP Lines for Business

By: John Shepler

Businesses large and small have been migrating to VoIP telephone technology for years now. Some are delighted with the move and have never look back. Others feel like they’ve lost something in the way of performance. The calls are often muddled and it’s hard to carry on a two way conversation. Would you believe that its the exact same technology involved? Why is it that VoIP telephony can range from excellent to unacceptable? Let’s take a look.

What’s VoIP
VoIP or Voice over Internet Protocol is a means to convert telephones into computer peripherals. The reason to do that is both to save money and enable applications that just won’t work on the old style telephone network. Network voice is a powerful tool, but can more easily be degraded that simpler analog phones.

Old School Phone Systems
Business phone lines are sometimes called POTS for Plain Old Telephone Service. They consist of twisted copper pair wires that run directly from the phone set all the way to the telephone company. Each phone has its own set of wires. Once you get more than a few phones, however, you face a mounting phone bill since the telco charges you to make internal as well as external calls.

Companies get around this by installing their own phone switches. Small systems use Key Telephone Systems where multiple outside lines are available on each phone but you can also call within the building on your own wiring. Larger companies install PBX (Private Branch Exchange) switches that manage a pool of outside lines that can be assigned to any phone as needed.

If you only have a couple of phones, each with their own line, the phone company takes care of all the switching for you. With many phones, you become your own little phone company for inside calls. That means you have to take care of all the special phone wiring and the Key or PBX switching equipment. Plus, you have to pay for multiple outside analog lines or a digital PRI trunk to get to the public telephone system.

How VoIP is Different
With VoIP, each phone plugs into your company LAN. That gets rid of the second special phone network. You still need something to switch the calls between phones. This can be a VoIP PBX or IP PBX that you have in-house. It can also be a much larger hosted PBX system from a hosted VoIP service provider. Hosted means that a specialized company “hosts” or run the system. You are one of many clients that they host. It’s pretty much like buying web hosting. You simply pay by the month for service instead of having to install and maintain your own equipment.

VoIP Phone Line Needs
All VoIP phones connect to a local network. This can be a small home office network that has only a computer, WiFi router, VoIP phone adaptor (for a regular phone) and broadband modem. Or, it can be an extensive corporate LAN that is bridged into multiple business locations nationwide and even overseas. The principles and the requirements for high quality performance are the same.

Since the network is shared with many phones and other computing devices, it take some doing to make sure that you get high performance. With dedicated analog lines, that’s the phone company’s problem. With VoIP, it’s now your IT problem.

What’s needed is plenty of bandwidth to accommodate all the phones and other devices. But that’s not enough. You need to give the voice packets priority over data because phone calls will start sounding muddled and choppy long before you notice that the file is loading slower. The network also needs low latency, packet loss and jitter to be transparent to the packets carrying the VoIP digitized phone conversations.

3 Types of VoIP Phone Lines
All analog phone lines are alike. All ISDN PRI trunks are alike. VoIP phone lines can be quite different. They range from Internet VoIP to SIP Trunks to MPLS private networks.

Using the Internet as Your Phone LIne
The low end of the market, which keeps costs low for home offices and small businesses, uses a broadband Internet service to connect to the VoIP service provider. You can share your broadband connection with a couple of computers, a WiFi router, and a few VoIP phones. You’ll need a router that creates CoS (Class of Service) to prioritize the phones or the computers will interfere with your calls. Sometimes the service provider will give you an adaptor that does this.

The advantage of using the Internet as a phone line is that it’s cheap. You probably already have broadband for your computer. The lure is to save money by “eliminating the separate phone line.” The downside is that the Internet was never designed for telephony. It was intended to reliably transport data files. There is no prioritization of voice on the Internet and most access lines, like DSL, Cable, Satellite and Cellular, are shared broadband. It’s a cost vs performance tradeoff. You may find that some calls sound perfect but others break up or sound muddled. It all depends on what else is happening on the Internet while you are making your call.

One way to improve Internet VoIP is to use a dedicated Internet access (DIA) like T1 or Ethernet over Copper. This keeps your neighbors from disrupting your calls while they download large video and software programs, but you are still subject to network congestion on the Internet itself.

Private Line VoIP Service
Companies that depend on high quality phone service for customer support and employee productivity usually sidestep the Internet in favor of something more predictable. The outside line that compares most closely to the legacy analog and PRI lines is the SIP Trunk. This is a digital broadband line, but it is a private line that is not shared with others. It’s called a SIP trunk because it supports SIP or Session Initiation Protocol, the switching system for VoIP calls.

A simple SIP trunk is a T1 line that runs from your network to your service provider. It supports up to a couple dozen simultaneous phone conversations or a combination of phone calls and Internet. The Internet service has a lower priority than the phone calls and uses whatever bandwidth isn’t needed for the phones at any given time. Smaller companies that don’t have dozens of phones find this is a great cost saver compared to maintaining separate phone and broadband lines.

Larger SIP trunks are also available for bigger companies or call centers. Both copper and fiber optic bandwidth is available to support as many calls as you need.

Voice over MPLS Networks
Major corporations generally have many business sites located around the country and even in other countries. They still want any employee to easily call any other employee without paying long distance toll charges. They also need to make outside calls to anyone with a phone.

A sophisticated solution is called VoMPLS or Voice over MPLS networks. MPLS is a private network arrangement with a regional, national or international service footprint. The network operator ensures that each paying customer has the necessary Class of Service, bandwidth and low latency, packet loss and jitter that they need for high performance.

VoMPLS works a lot like VoIP using SIP Trunks. The difference is that instead of having to run dedicated private lines among all your locations, you simply need an access line from each location to the MPLS network. This can give you a major cost savings, especially on those long international connections, while maintaining high network performance.

Are you in search of a better telephone solution, to reduce costs, increase available features or both? If so, there are VoIP telephone solutions you should take a close look at.

Cloud Hosted IP PBX Enables New Telephone Apps

You know how apps have taken the smartphone market by storm. Now even desktop and laptop computers are changing their approach away from traditional software packages and toward apps. Have you been thinking that there should be some apps for your phone system, too?

Well, they’re here. AireSpring is offering a suite of apps that work with their AirePBX cloud hosted PBX system. What sort of things can you do with these apps? Let’s take a look.

CommPortal is the interface that controls your messaging on the PBX. You can check your voice mail online or have them sent to your email. Set up a one-number service that will locate you no matter which device you may be using at the moment. You can choose to prioritize some callers over others and even send some directly to voicemail. Click-to-dial will ring your phone first and then dial the party you want. Contacts are always available on whatever device you are using.

Now CommPortal is available as an app that works on multiple platforms so that you have your PBX with you at all times. Other apps are also available. Two of these are the “Call Me” button and the QuickDial Accelerator.

Call Me buttons make it easy to connect instantly to customers. You install this button on your Web pages or email signature. When the customer clicks on the button, they are prompted to enter their phone number. You phone rings immediately so you can capitalize on opportunities that may disappear in a few minutes.

The complement to Call Me buttons is the QuickDial Accelerator. This cool app lets you initiate a call right from your browser window. Simply highlight any phone number you want to call and the system will place the call for you. No more trying to wrangle two screens at once or risk dialing the wrong number.

Why are we seeing the appearance of telephone system apps at this time? It coincides with the move to cloud hosted PBX systems. The traditional PBX is all about switching calls between desk phones in the office and connecting to outside trunk lines when you need to make a call outside the company. This was cutting edge technology at one time. No more. Today’s telephony is all about unified communications and computer telephone integration. What we’d like to have in a business phone system was difficult to impossible to do previously and expensive to do now using the old school technologies.

Many companies that dream of having the latest business phone features choke when they see the price tag on the latest sophisticated IP PBX systems. They also worry about the day when their present PBX runs out of capacity or becomes unmaintainable and they have to face the music on capital investment. What they may not realize is that all of these issues can be easily avoided by employing cloud hosted PBX services.

Hosted PBX means that instead of buying and maintaining your own in-house PBX system, you pay for use of a much larger and likely more sophisticated PBX operated by a service provider. The service provider has the investment and expertise to support many clients. Economy of scale means that this approach is often less expensive than doing it yourself, even without the capital investment.

Are you dissatisfied with your current business phone system but unsure what to do next? If so, get more information about Cloud Hosted IP PBX solutions and compare with your other alternatives.

Business VoIP Solution Options

You may be considering a move from a traditional analog or PBX business phone system to VoIP or Voice over Internet Protocol telephony. Before you jump into a major “forklift upgrade,” you should know that there are a number of good business VoIP solutions to consider. Which one you pick will depend on your particular situation. Pick the right one and you’ll get the most for your telephony dollar.

Why even consider VoIP in the first place? The reason is to save money, add calling features or both. Let’s start with the needs of very small businesses and work our way up to enterprise solutions.

The smaller businesses will have one to four outgoing phone lines and under 10 handsets. This is typical of small sales offices, retail stores and independent professionals. You may well be using individual analog phone lines and perhaps 2 or 4 line phones that you can buy at office supply stores.

A system this small doesn’t justify a PBX phone system or PRI digital trunking. But you do have the option to change to a broadband phone or SIP trunking solution. Broadband phone is typified by the Phone Power VoIP service. You connect a device called an ATA or Analog Telephone Adaptor to your broadband service, typically Cable Internet, and plug one or two telephones plus your computer or router into the ATA. You no longer need an analog telephone line because your broadband connection is used for both phone and Internet. A typical small office VoIP service plan costs $14.95 a month, but temporary special offers can make this even cheaper.

A step up from single phone number VoIP is called SIP trunking. This service uses a T1 line or other business grade private line to provide multiple line telephone service plus broadband to a small to medium size business. By using dynamic bandwidth management, phone calls have all the bandwidth they require for maximum call quality. Remaining bandwidth is assigned to Internet access. As calls hang up, the bandwidth they were using is automatically or dynamically reassigned for Internet service. This way the full capacity of the line is always put to good use.

Companies large enough to have an in-house key telephone or PBX system generally have many handsets and at least 6 to 10 outside lines. If your system is getting to the end of its useful life, you have the choice of replacing it with a newer IP PBX system or going with a hosted PBX solution. Hosted PBX means that you don’t have any PBX equipment in-house. Your service provider connects to SIP telephones or analog phones with adaptors on your LAN and performs both the internal and external call switching.

Enterprise VoIP telephony also consists of using SIP telephones in place of regular telephone handsets. These SIP phones allow you to converge your telephone and computer networks into a single LAN for both voice and data. You can choose to host an IP PBX system in-house or elect to go with a hosted PBX solution. The tradeoff is capital equipment cost and online maintenance versus paying a monthly fee to a service provider. Think of hosted PBX as a cloud service for business telephony. Even if you install and operate your own IP PBX system, you still have the option to use SIP trunking to connect with a service provider that will terminate outside calls to the public telephone system. The more traditional solution is to use ISDN PRI telephone trunks for the same purpose.

Which VoIP solution, if any, make the most sense for your organization? There are a lot of variables involved and many suppliers. Why not let an experienced Telarus telecom consultant help you compare costs and features of business VoIP solutions? Then make an informed decision to get the most for your telecom budget.

What XO’s 1,000,000 VoIP Customers Predicts

XO Communications, a major competitive telecom carrier, recently achieved the milestone of reaching 1,000,000 business VoIP end users.



What should be noted is that it came as a surprise, even to XO, that the millionth customer would arrive in only 5 years. You may have raised an eyebrow, too, if you’ve been struggling with the decision on whether or not to embrace enterprise VoIP technology. We’ve all been on calls with someone using a poorly implemented VoIP solution and have been repelled by the distortion, voice clipping, noise modulation and even dropped calls of VoIP done badly. Well, it doesn’t have to be that way. After all, a million business customers must know something, right?

What they know is that professional grade communications solutions are carefully engineered to accommodate the needs of the technology. For instance, XO’s IP Flex service is implemented over a T1 line or similar commercial bandwidth connection. Terminal equipment on both ends ensures that voice packets have the bandwidth, latency, and jitter characteristics they need to travel unscathed from user to service provider. They are protected from interference by data transfers by giving voice priority over data. The circuit is engineered to ensure that you can have all the telephone calls you need in progress simultaneously and still have adequate bandwidth for high speed Internet service on the same line.

The secret to enterprise VoIP is in careful control of the network. That network must include your converged LAN plus the link to your telephone and Internet service provider. SIP Trunking, a larger scale version of integrated voice and data lines, even allows you to include multiple business locations on the same outgoing phone lines. Internal calls stay on your network and avoid telco toll charges completely.

There is a future to telecommunications services, and the million XO VoIP customers shows that we are moving to an IP-centric business environment faster than most of us realize. Those who have made the switch are now enjoying the twin benefits of added services and lower costs.

Is your business, large or small, looking at ways to save on your monthly telecom expenses while maintaining quality of service? If so, then get competitive quotes on Enterprise VoIP Voice and Data Services.

Free Help On Your Telecom Needs

How would you like to hire some help for free? Not just any help, mind you, but high quality technical expertise to assist you with your telephone and computer networks. No out of pocket cost today or ever. Do you think that offer works well with today’s shrunken personnel budgets?

I’ll bet you do. In fact, you are probably chafing at the bit to find out where you can get some of this help before it’s all gone. Well, relax. There’s plenty to go around.

How can this be true? After all, if you expect to get a service then you also expect to pay for it. You can’t get something for nothing, can you? Yes, you can, if someone else is paying the bill.

Perplexed? Don’t be. What I’m talking about is a telecom brokerage service that has a large group of expert consultants in telephony, computer networking, international network services, wireless business solutions and the like. They stand ready to work with you right now, if only you would let them know what you need. You don’t have to be too specific. Just type a sentence or two to give them the general gist of what you are after. Someone will email or call you shortly to work through the details.

What happens after that? Your friendly consultant may take a few hours or even a couple of days to gather quotes of dozens of competitive service providers and sort out the best price/performance offers to present to you. This is the type of leg work your own staff would otherwise have to do... while you are paying them. No available IT staff to query dozens of potential suppliers in order to find the best match to your needs? Then you really need this service.

Some of these expert consultants routinely spend hours, even dozens of hours working on a single project for their client. How much do they bill per hour? Nothing at all. Oh, they get paid alright. But it’s not by you or any other end user. The brokerage service is paid by the service providers themselves in lieu of having to hire their own staff to do this work. You don’t get dinged with a higher price for service either. You’ll pay exactly the same as if you tracked down each competitive carrier or other service provider and ordered service directly from them without any outside assistance.

One other big advantage of working through a telecom broker is that they have the ability to compare and contrast offers from several to several dozen providers offering a suitable service for your business and location. They can keep a cool head sorting through the offers because they aren’t beholding to a particular vendor. They also know about special limited time offers being run by each providers, information you are unlikely to discover yourself.

So, whether you don’t have a staff or would just rather supplement their effort with free expert consulting service, you owe it to yourself and your bottom line to take advantage of this offer. Simply enter a brief online inquiry to describe your networking need and a friendly Telarus consultant will be touch pronto. You’ll be surprised at how much information you get for almost no effort on your part.

USA Digital Offers Comprehensive Call Center Services

Call centers and company contact centers have special requirements for the high volume telephony services they use. USA Digital serves this market with a suite of high performance cost effective telecom services.

USA Digital Communications Inc., often called USA Digital for short, is a licensed, certified carrier in all 50 states. Since founding in 1991, their business has been known for rapid growth and customer retention. Wouldn’t a lot of companies like to claim that? The secret to USA Digital’s success may be summed up as excellent customer service combined with an extensive range of services to support both voice and data needs.

Call center operations are a special focus for USA Digital. It starts with digital line services from T1 through OC12. T1 is a popular service and provided by many carriers. However, not all of those T1 services are optimized for cost on high volume calling. For instance, USA Digital offers initial six second billing minimum. That’s typical in the industry. But then USA Digital billing switches to one second increments. That alone can save you 30% in the cost of the minutes you use.

Another big saver is 4 digit versus 2 digit rounding. Those decimal points might seem arcane, but in high volume calling minor fractions of a second add up to big money. That’s especially true if 4 digital rounding is combined with low dedicated interstate rates on T1 service.

USA Digital has a service team experienced in provisioning voice lines, PRI’s, CO meet-point circuits, cross connects and SS7 links. That same experience is applied as you move up the circuit class to DS3 (T3) trunks and into the fiber optic services from OC3 to OC12. These OCx connections are truly business carrier class services needed by the largest call center operations and requiring the highest levels of expertise for support. An OC3 gives you the capacity of about 3 DS3’s and OC12 is the bandwidth of 4 OC3’s or 12 DS3’s. USA Digital can deliver OC3s in the form of 3 DS3’s that may be separated into individual T1 services.

In addition to bandwidth, dedicated outbound services are a specialty of USA Digital. They offer FTC telemarketing sale rule and do not call services to make sure you are in compliance with government regulations for outbound call centers. Their do not call services are capable of blocking 100% of calls registered to both state and national do-not-call lists. In addition, USA Digital provides customized Caller ID Service so that you can communicate appropriate caller information over your service lines.

USA Digital’s services are appropriate for in-house customer service contact centers up through major independent call centers and carriers, including ILEC, CLEC and wireless. Beyond traditional switched circuit voice trunks, they also support VoIP (SIP, H3223), point to point dedicated lines, and MPLS networks for linking multiple business locations.

Can you benefit from business telecom services like these? If so, you’ll want to get customized telecom service pricing and consultation for USA Digital and other competitive service providers as soon as possible. You could be looking a major cost savings.

QT Talk is Both VoIP and Dial-Around

You’ve been toying with the idea of switching your phone service to VoIP to save money and get more calling features. But now you’re in a quandary. VoIP is a landline service that needs a wire. Granted, it’s a broadband wire like DSL or Cable Internet. But you still need a fixed location to install it. What do you do when you are out and about, like you are most of the time? For that you need wireless service. Wireless and VoIP? They don’t go together, do they?

Now they do. You’re not the only one with this problem. Lots of people would like the calling features and low rates, especially international rates, that are offered by popular VoIP calling plans. But they also want these rates available on their cell phone. QT Talk says, “no problem.” Take both at the same price.

How can this possibly work? It’s a very clever system. The heart of the service is a feature-rich VoIP telephony service. The most popular option is called North America Plus, which includes unlimited calling to the U.S., Canada and Puerto Rico for a special introductory rate of $12.95 for the first 3 months. Then it’s the standard rate of $19.95 per month, a great deal in itself. You also get to choose a special low rate to an international destination that includes Mexico, Philippines, Pakistan, Bangladesh, India and Vietnam.

Well that sounds great for a VoIP service, but what about cellular use? How are you going to call Mexico or Vietnam from your cell phone and not get a monster bill the next month?

Ah, that’s where the dial-around service comes into play. Along with your North America Plus VoIP service, you also get free access to a toll-free number that gives you the same rate that you enjoy on your VoIP. So, if you want to make a nice long call to Canada from your cell, just call the toll free number and talk to your heart’s content. It’s all part of your plan. Want to call Vietnam from your car (while stopped, of course)? It’s just 9.9 cents a minute on your cell, along with using cellular minutes.

Who is QT Talk service ideal for? It’s for residential and small business users, like home offices, that want an unlimited calling plan within the US, Canada and Puerto Rico. It is especially good if you make international calls to any of the 6 designated countries. You can upgrade your service to have unlimited calling to 35 global destinations with a service called Unlimited World Select. That’s just $34.95 a month.

How about those VoIP features? Included with your service are speed dialing, call forwarding, simultaneous ring, call waiting, caller ID, call return, caller ID block, do not disturb, last number redial, conference calls, transfer your current number or get a new one, and online account management. All this, no extra charge.

So who’s behind QT Talk? It’s QT Globe, a major international telecommunications company that sells wholesale services to other carriers. They’ve got the network in place to serve fussy telecom carriers, but they also offer retail services to serve fussy individuals and businesses.

By the way, QT Talk also offers feature rich business plans and IP telephones as well as the residential services designed for the individual, family and home office user.

Does this sound like a service that would meet your needs? If so, learn more and order your QT Talk calling plan quickly and easily online.

T-1 Digital Telephone Lines

If your business has multiple telephone lines, you may already be familiar with T-1 digital telephone lines. If not, you may be missing an opportunity to save money on every monthly phone bill. Even if you have T1 service installed now, you may not be aware of all the currently available options and the cost savings that could be yours.

Digital telephony traces its roots back to the 1950's, when the telephone companies were looking for ways to efficiently transport dozens, even hundreds or thousands of phone calls. Basic analog phone lines carry only one conversation per pair of copper wires. An analog multiplexing scheme, called carrier telephony, treated the phone lines like radio bands to transport multiple calls per pair of wires between phone company offices. Multiplexed analog trunks cut down of the number of wires needed, but suffered from noise and crosstalk problems that lowered long distance call quality.

The T-carrier system, which offered T1 and T3 digital trunk lines, has been the solution of choice for both telephone companies and larger businesses for decades. T1 lines are divided into 24 time multiplexed channels, each carrying one digitized telephone conversation. Only two pair of common telephone wire are needed for T1 telephone line. One pair is for transmit and one for receive. T1 lines start making economic sense when you have 10 or 12 outgoing phone lines. That threshold is shrinking as T1 line prices are steadily reduced, while analog phone line prices remain relatively constant.

An improved T-1 digital telephone line is called ISDN PRI, short for Integrated Services Digital Network Primary Rate Interface. It's called PRI or T1 PRI for short. PRI uses a channelized T1 line but reserves 1 of the 24 channels for signaling and digital information. The other 23 channels are available to support telephone calls. This technology has the advantage that all of the bits in each channel are used for digitized voice signals. The signaling channel serves the other 23 and makes calls connect and disconnect faster. It also provides Caller ID information, which standard T1 phone lines cannot support. T1 PRI is now the standard for business PBX systems and call centers, where multiple phone lines are in simultaneous use.

But what if you only need 4 to 6 outgoing phone lines? There is another solution called Integrated T1 service that combines telephone and Internet service on a single T1 line. You get up to 12 channels for telephone service. The rest are used to bring in broadband Internet access. A version called a dynamic T1 line automatically reassigns unused telephone channels for Internet bandwidth until they are needed. This way you can get up to 1.5 Mbps broadband speeds for upload and download but be sure that phone service is always given priority as needed. The cost of Integrated T1 service is attractive because most companies need both telephone and Internet service.

An even newer T1 line service is called SIP Trunking. SIP is the signaling protocol used by VoIP telephone systems. A SIP Trunking provider offers both VoIP telephone service and Internet access over a single T1 line. If you need more capacity on this or any of the other T1 services, you can add additional T1 lines as needed.

Are you interested in exploring the cost savings opportunities offered by T-1 digital telephone lines, or looking to see if you can save money on your current digital services, then use our Shop For T1 GeoQuote (tm) search tool to get instant online quotes so you can compare prices.

IP Phones Are In Demand

Enterprise VoIP is growing like crazy, but consumer adoption of IP phones is lagging far behind. That's the assessment of a recent study of the IP phone market. Is it that residential users aren't embracing new communication technology the way businesses are, or is there another explanation?

IP networks have been chipping away at the switched telephone network franchise for years. The reasons for this are both technical and financial.

For the consumer, the primary impetus has been to leverage their relatively expensive broadband (compared to dial-up) Internet service to also provide telephone services. There are many residential VoIP phone companies that offer bundled local and long distance service along with a dozen or two calling features all for one bundled price. For many consumers that price is lower that what you get ordering from the incumbent local telephone company.

There have also been a wealth of bundled CLECs or competitive local exchange carriers that competed with the incumbents, but changes in the telecom rules make leasing the telephone wires to your house too expensive for CLECs to offer an overall cost savings.

How do VoIP providers compete? They avoid the cost of leasing phone wires by using broadband services you already pay for. That can be either DSL or Cable, but the point is that most people buy broadband for their computers. VoIP uses the same connection as an alternative "phone wire" without additional cost. They also let consumers save money by reusing the phone they already have. You unplug your telephone set from the wall and plug it into an ATA or Analog Telephone Adapter box that is provided by the VoIP company, usually at no extra cost.

This is one reason that there is little to no demand for consumer IP phones. The residential marketplace isn't sophisticated enough yet to take advantage of services, like computer/telephone integration, or additional phone services, like videophone, that are practical with VoIP but not over traditional analog phone wires. Most consumers are still using corded handsets or cordless multi-telephone sets like the ones offered by Uniden.

The enterprise VoIP marketplace is quite different. Companies have various reasons for migrating to VoIP, but almost all are related to saving money directly or improving productivity to save money. While it is possible to get a better deal on local dial tone and long distance minutes using SIP Trunking instead of analog lines or T1 PRI digital phone lines, the real driver is the in-house phone system itself.

Traditional PBX telephone systems are large, proprietary and expensive to buy and maintain. They are rapidly giving way to IP PBX systems that are more like computer appliances than dedicated phone systems. IP telephony in-house offers the opportunity to converge the telephone and data networks into a single Ethernet connection to the desktop. Administrative and technical support can be considerably less for one network versus two, once the engineering has been accomplished to ensure quality of service for both voice and data users.

Like consumer VoIP, a business can acquire analog telephone adaptors and continue to use their existing handsets on the company LAN. But many additional features become available by switching to desk sets designed for IP services. The phone itself contains the network interface plus text display, video, and other features that make it as much a computer peripheral as a telephone. These phones are called IP phones or SIP phones. SIP is the switching technology used by VoIP telephone systems. There are many vendors of business IP phones, with Cisco being a major player.

Another point the report makes is that corded phones are the standard now, but will be replaced more and more by cordless and wireless handsets. That includes cell phones that are integrated into the corporate IP PBX systems, and perhaps wireless VoIP phones that will operate over the new LTE cellular broadband and WiMAX wireless networks that are just now starting to be deployed.

Managed IP Networks Enable Voice and Data Convergence

Many companies have been eying their computer and telephone networks for opportunities to save money without losing services. A popular approach is to combine or converge those two networks into a single multi-functional LAN that can be extended to connect with the public Internet and telephone network. One network, one connection per desk, and one support team are the goal. Sadly, the reality can fall short of the dream.

What's the reason for this? The way computers traditionally use a network is quite different from how a telephone uses its network or a security camera uses its video network. Most of what we use computers for is to shuttle data from one place to another. The main requirement is that the data remains intact. What is received must be bit for bit identical to what is sent. It doesn't really matter if there are short delays in the transfer or if some parts of the data set need to be resent because they arrived corrupted. As long as data integrity remains intact and the transfer time doesn't impact productivity, the computer network is doing its job.

The telephone network is a different animal. Telephony is a real time process. You speak into one phone and your voice comes out of another. It's a continuous process in analog telephony, consisting of an varying electrical signal that is present for the duration of the call. Any delays, interruptions or added noise are noticeable and objectionable. They are perceived to be degradations of the service.

What convergence does is convert analog telephone signals into data packets that are compatible with an Ethernet computer network. The phone, in essence, becomes a computer. But to emulate a telephone network, any phone packets need special care and protection from being pushed out of the way by large data file transfers. A stream of telephone data representing a voice signal can't be retransmitted if it is corrupted. That would make two-way conversations even more confusing than a few glitches from missing packets. When voice is added to a data network, it needs to be treated as first among equals.

That's the challenge of network convergence. The techniques often adopted are to have enough bandwidth to accommodate voice, video and data simultaneously. In addition, real time signals such as telephone or video cameras are given priority over less time sensitive packets such as computer file transfers.

Now, consider the Internet. The Internet treats all packets the same and gives no priorities to voice, data or video. In addition, parameters such as latency (time delay), jitter (variations in time delay), packet loss and bandwidth have no guarantees. You get what you get and it may vary from second to second.

That's the impetus behind managed IP networks. A managed IP network is like having a private Internet. You use the same equipment, the same protocols, and connect to the same places. But the network you travel on is carefully managed to ensure quality for your critical packets. Where it connects to the actual Internet to give you access to this important public resource, there are protections so that you still have quality assurances for your telephone services that don't travel on the Internet.

If you've been disappointed by the results you are getting from company initiatives to move to enterprise VoIP telephone services or converged voice and data networks, then you may be pleasantly surprised by the results you can get with managed IP networks. Take a few minutes and find out what a managed IP network can do for you.

Free International Phone Calls

In these depressed economic times, what's the word you really long to hear? I know... FREE. Did you know that you can make international phone calls for free until the end of this year, 2008?

Well, you can with a special promotional offer from Phone Power. They're doing this to promote their highly competitive business and residential VoIP telephone services. If you're a heavy user of international minutes, you'll want to jump on this deal as soon as you can. But even when the promotion expires or you just want domestic phone service, I think you'll find that Phone Power is a really good deal.

Let's see where you can call for free this holiday season. This offer applies only to landline destinations in this list of countries and their calling codes:

United Kingdom (44)
Spain (34)
Ireland (353)
Israel (972)
Germany (49)
Singapore (65)
France (33)
Denmark (45)
Greece (30)
Italy (39)
China (86)

China? Free calls to China? Yes. I know that seems fantastic when not so long ago you could pay a buck a minute or more to make calls to China. Hey, I remember when calling Europe would set you back a week's pay. Well, friends, now you can call these destinations for free this month.

Of course, you'll need a Phone Power account to make these free calls. Residential plans start at a promotional price of $9.95 a month for virtually unlimited inbound and outbound service. There's a prepay plan that gives you 2 lines for 2 years for $200. Are they kidding? That's under $5 a line per month.

No, I just checked the site. They're not kidding. That service includes over 25 features such as caller ID, find me - follow me, E911, music on hold, call forwarding, voice mail and a lot more. Other pricing plans start at 500 minutes for a regular price of $17.95 a month and a promotional offer of $9.95 a month.

How about business plans? Virtually unlimited monthly calling is available for $39.95 a month. I say virtually unlimited because after 5,000 outbound minutes are used, you pay a 2 cent per minute overage cost. Now that's for both local and continential US long distance calls. Compare that with what your local telco will ding you for just local business service. Phone Power business lines also have an extensive feature set and qualify for an auto-attendant and music on-hold.

If your business is larger than just a couple of desk phones in a tiny office, you may want the advantage of a hosted PBX system. This is the type of telephone system that you've been spoiled by if you've ever worked for a major corporation. With the Phone Power hosted PBX you can have dozens or even hundreds of extensions and they don't even have to be in the same building. That's one of the big advantages of VoIP telephony. With a hosted service you don't have to buy or maintain a central telephone system. That's all taken care of for you.

Phone Power is clearly out to get your business. They certainly seem deserving with their low prices and extensive features. If you want the 2008 free international calling deal, or even if you don't, it is well worth your while to give Phone Power a closer look. They could save you bundle on your telephone expenses.

MPLS Networks for Enterprise VoIP

Medium and larger size companies often have multiple locations with multiple sites around in the metro area, and even branch offices scattered around the country or the world. Traditional PBX phone systems with connections to the PSTN (Public Switched Telephone Network) have provided high quality telephone service for decades. So why risk switching to a VoIP phone system? If you do, what takes the place of the PSTN?

The proven quality and reliability of the century-old public telephone network has made many organizations think twice before embracing newer technology. After all, the legacy of "Ma Bell" is formidable indeed. Indeed, it's not uncommon for companies to gut their internal phone systems and replace them with network voice equipment while leaving the old phone lines in place. An IP PBX with SIP phones on every desk can take the place of the old proprietary PBX design to add functionality and ease of moves, adds and changes. By plugging in a multiple FXO card or T1 PRI Interface card, the existing PSTN connections can continue to be used as-is. There is no need to change this, but there may well be lost opportunity.

Consider the multiple location organization. The simplest telephony solution is to install separate phone systems at each location and route all your inter-office calls through the PSTN exactly as any other outside calls. Therein lies the problem. Every time the public toll network is used to connect from place to place, there is a per minute charge. We expect that when calling customers or vendors long distance. But for internal calls it can get pricey fast. It doesn't seem right to discourage employees from calling colleagues at other sites, but when cost control becomes critical it can become necessary.

The other problem is that you enjoy three or four digit calling within your building but wind up having to dial all 10 digits to get to another location. It reinforces the notion of us (inside) versus them (outside). It feels a lot more like the same company when every call to every desk works the same regardless of location.

A solution to the dialing problem that also lets you avoid toll charges is to connect your various phone systems together via PBX tie lines. These are point to point solutions, so you'll need to either create a star network with all control at a central office or install tie lines from every office to every other office. Oh, but that gets expensive fast.

What you really want is a fully meshed network where any location can connect to any other through a cloud. The PSTN does that on a switched basis. The Internet does the same thing for IP data. But the Internet is iffy as a telephone network. It was never designed to ensure quality of service for real time applications such as VoIP. It can work fine sometimes, not so good at other times, and just terrible when you least expect or can afford it. What you need is a private version of the Internet structure but designed to properly transport packet based phone conversations.

MPLS or Multi-Protocol Label Switched networks do just that. MPLS uses specialized tag switches instead of IP routers to identify each packet and ensure that it gets directly to the proper destination and with enough bandwidth to avoid and delays or corruption. MPLS networks are private IP-based networks that handle a wide variety of voice, video, and data traffic in various protocols. Hence the term multi-protocol. But why are MPLS networks so suited to enterprise VoIP telephony?

MPLS networks offer a meshed cloud structure that each site connects to via a broadband IP service, such as a T1 line. Within the cloud, the tag switches label packets as voice or data and then transfer them to their intended destination. QoS or Quality of Service is guaranteed by the tagging process and adequate resources of the network. The result is ease of connectivity from any site to any other site with call quality assured. It's the PSTN updated for today's packet network technology.

Prior to MPLS networks, Frame Relay networks were another way to provide similar connectivity. But the newer competitive MPLS networks offer considerable cost savings while supporting both voice, video and data connections among your business locations. Could MPLS be the high quality / best cost solution for your company's upgrade to VoIP telephony? a newly introduced specialized search tool makes it easy to find out. Get an unbiased service quote that meets your needs in less than 24 hours with an easy 2-minute online MPLS network query process right now.

Know the Lingo to Save Money

If you want to be successful with any technology, you need to know the lingo. The world of VoIP telephony is no different. Actually it is. There is a Lingo as well as lingo.

Lingo the company and product, not lingo the vernacular, is a broadband phone service with offerings for both residential and business users. These offers are intended to save users considerable cost versus conventional wireline telephone service, especially if you have reason to call overseas from the United States.

Let's take a look at the residential plans first. You can choose from Chatter Box, Global Gabber, Lingo Link, Small Talk, South Asia, Talk 365, and LatAM SaveMore. Gotta love those names.

Chatter Box is the featured plan. It's priced at $21.95 a month. For that you get unlimited calling to numbers in the US and Canada. Sounds similar to other VoIP services on the market. But, Chatter Box also gives you unlimited calling to UK, Germany, France, Italy, Ireland, Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark, Switzerland, Sweden, Spain, Finland, Austria, Luxembourg, Norway, Vatican City, Portugal, New Zealand, Australia, Singapore, & South Korea as well. If you have friends or relatives in any of these countries, you'll have a hard time beating this deal.

LatAM Save More is the same price, but gives you unlimited calling to US, Canada, Puerto Rico, Mexico City, Buenos Aires, Caracas, & Rio de Janeiro. LatAM being Latin America, of course.

South Asia gives you unlimited calling to the US, Canada and Puerto Rico. But the 2.9 cent per minute long distance rates to India and Bangladesh are what make this plan truly special.

The lowest cost residential plan is appropriately called Small Talk. This one is for the person who wants home phone service but isn't a heavy user. You get 500 minutes to call anywhere in the US, Canada or Puerto Rico. You only pay $14.95 a month. Let's see the phone company beat that.

Business calling plans start at $39.5 a month for 500 minutes to the US, Canada and Puerto Rico, and go up to $79.95 for unlimited calling to US, Canada, UK, Puerto Rico, Netherlands, Germany, France, Italy, Ireland, Belgium, Austria, Denmark, Switzerland, Sweden, Spain, Finland, Luxembourg, Norway, Australia, Vatican City, Portugal, New Zealand, China, Singapore, South Korea, Japan, Hong Kong & Taiwan. If you do business internationally, I don't see how you can miss with this service.

Business plans differ from residential plans in that they include the Lingo Office Assistant. This is software in the form of a toolbar that's added to Microsoft Outlook and Internet Explorer. With it, you can make calls directly from your desktop, access voicemail, and set up your cell phone or home phone to be your business phone.

Wired Magazine named Lingo as it's Editor's Pick for a VoIP telephone service. They describe domestic calls as sounding superb, which is not always the case with phone services that share a broadband connection with your computer.

Is Lingo right for you? Learn more about the Lingo service plans and the many, many included features. Also check prices and special offers, which are always subject to change in this competitive business. If you like what you see, go ahead and sign up quickly and easily online. You have a 30 day money back guarantee from Lingo to ensure your satisfaction with their service.

VoIP Without The Internet

VoIP or Voice over Internet Protocol telephony made its name as an Internet based telephone service alternative. The idea was to use the broadband connection that most residential and business users had in place to also connect with their phone service provider. Competitive service providers could avoid paying the local telephone companies to lease the existing copper phone lines and offer a better bundled price to customers. In theory, it should be easy for the gigantic Internet pipe to transport low bandwidth voice streams.

Well, that's the theory. In practice, that big pipe isn't always so infinitely large. Like the super highway it emulates, Internet paths can become congested with packets just as easily as highways become congested with cars. Bandwidth congestion, transmission delays called latency, and dropped packets can easily tear up a phone conversation or any other type of real time data stream.

Most of the problem is in the infamous first-mile. That's the connection between your location and your service provider's point of presence or POP. Shared bandwidth arrangements such as DSL and Cable broadband make no guarantees as to availability or quality of service. One minute everything is working great. Next minute the line goes dead. Or at least the conversation gets garbled from time to time.

Consumers might put up with this level of performance if they can save enough money on their phone bill. But businesses really can't afford the customer annoyance and lost connections during important conversations. Having experienced problems with VoIP installations or hearing horror stories has convinced many businesses to hunker down and avoid the entire network voice issue. Others have worked out arrangements so that they can have the best of both worlds. They get the reliability and voice quality they've come to expect from the public switched telephone network. Plus the cost savings and added features that come from a converged voice and data network.

How do the successful businesses do it? For many the secret is as simple as avoiding the Internet for anything but Web and email access or electronic data interchange. But that doesn't have to mean maintaining a bank of analog phone lines and an ancient telephone system. There are at least two ways to have your VoIP without having to eat the problems too.

The first approach is to go with a hybrid PBX phone system. Within your plant, the phones and switch are IP based. SIP telephones and an IP PBX system allow you to use a single Ethernet LAN to connect both computers and phones. Yes, you'll need to carefully engineer your network to make sure that voice packets move unrestricted. But that may well be worth the effort to eliminate the separate telephone network and all its maintenance expense. With the hybrid approach, IP stops at the IP PBX. Plug-in interface cards for T1 PRI trunks or simple analog lines bring in conventional telephone service.

The second approach is to employ SIP trunking to connect your IP PBX to your competitive phone service provider. SIP trunking is a private line arrangement that maintains the integrity of the VoIP packets all the way from telephone set to service provider. The SIP trunk is usually shared with Internet data coming from the service provider to your network. However, your voice packets never traverse the public Internet. They stay on the SIP trunk until they are terminated to the public telephone network by your provider. You are never in contention with other users for the bandwidth that transmits your voice and data packets.

Both of these approaches give you control over Quality of Service for your telephone calls. Either you connect to the public phone network at your company location. Or your send your call streams to your service provider over a carefully engineered private line. It avoids the contention and variability that are inherent to that public facility that is the Internet.

Are you interested in improving your business telephone system but concerned about maintaining quality and reliability. Let our expert consultants recommend alternative approaches that address those concerns but also offer capital and operational cost savings. Tell us about your needs at EnterpriseVoIP.com.

Buy Convergence By The Byte

XO Communications is changing the game on legacy telecommunication carriers by offering IP Network services priced by amount of bandwidth used rather than number of lines or channels in service. What's putting the nail in the coffin of TDM based telephony services is both a switch to an IP based network and the use of Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) for telephone trunking. By starting with a packet switched network and then transmitting everything in packet protocol, voice and data traffic is easily combined on a single circuit.

Convergence, the idea of using a single network for voice, video and data, is an idea that has been gaining popularity with IT departments looking to simplify network management. It's also popular with executives eying potential cost reductions as networks are merged. The fly in the ointment has been the abrupt disconnect between the local area network and wide area network services. With IP inside the plant and TDM outside, there's an exercise in protocol conversion and call termination needed to make everything work.

XO is changing that paradigm with its IPfolio. Two things make IPfolio different from industry practice. First is that a suite of IP services all run on a single underlying network so seamlessly that you can mix and match at will to create a custom solution for your operation. It's something like a telecom buffet. You can choose from an IP VPN to connect multiple business sites, SIP based telephone trunking for your IP PBX phone system, and dedicated Internet access with dynamic bandwidth allocation. Voice is treated as a data application, the real secret to network convergence.

The second unique feature of IPfolio, and perhaps the more disruptive to the industry, is that your services are priced by how many Mbps you use, not feature by feature or even by service bundles. You can scale the bandwidth you need between 1.5 and 45 Mbps. Within that range, you'll get unlimited local calling and site to site calls between company locations. It is SIP based VoIP telephony, so you are not limited by channel allocations or phone "lines". Pack as many calls as will fit into the bandwidth you are paying for. This service is compatible with leading PBX systems, including those from Cisco, Avaya and other suppliers. Optional services include long distance plans sized from 2K to 40K minutes per month.

The XO MPLS IP-VPN portion of the IPfolio is an MPLS network solution with VPN capabilities to connect multiple business locations securely. It's set up for multiple classes of services to ensure that applications run smoothly and that large data downloads don't disrupt real-time voice communications.

The XO IPfolio tries to encompass all of the communications services that businesses need and offer them with a pricing structure more geared to IP based telecommunications. IPfolio was introduced in 2007 in selected cities and is now available nationwide.

If you think that your company might benefit from converged IP services or more cost effective traditional line services, let our team of expert consultants get you competitive quotes tailored to your needs. You might be surprised by how much you can save over your current solutions.

We're Looking For Successful IT Consultants

You're a seasoned information technology professional. Have you already taken your skills to the next level of success by forming your own consulting company? Perhaps you offer your personal expertise in the design, implementation and troubleshooting of voice and data networks. Maybe you've gone further to become a certified partner with one or more equipment vendors so you can earn extra income from selling the hardware and well as your knowledge. Are you that person? If so, we want you.

What is it we're offering? It's a chance to boost your level of business with additional prospects located in your service footprint and additional service lines. Now, don't worry. There's no cost to get involved and no big learning curve, either. Think of it as an fast and easy incremental boost to the business you are already building.

Interested? Good. Here's what's involved. The opportunity I allude to is the VAR Network. You probably already know that VAR means Value Added Reseller, the industry term for businesses that offer consulting and support services related to the hardware they sell. The basic idea behind the VAR Network is to provide an efficient way to connect businesses that need digital voice and data products and services with independent experts who are already selling to exactly those types of businesses. This doesn't change anything you're doing. It just hooks you up with more customers who may not be aware of your availability.

The VAR Network is so efficient because it's based on Web tools that capture customer requests and route them only to VAR Partners in the right location with the right product line and/or skill set. It handles everything from wiring installation to routers and security appliances, to complete enterprise VoIP solutions including handsets, IP PBX, networking and line services.

Line services? Yes, by becoming a partner of the VAR Network you also become enabled to offer your clients voice and data line services such as T1 lines, DS3 bandwidth, Ethernet WAN connectivity, MPLS networks, VPN solutions, and metro to long haul fiber carriers. This is likely business you've been leaving on the table because you don't have the background or relationships with telecom carriers to make any money from line services. Now you will. All you have to do is gather the customer's requirements and the bandwidth specialists assigned to the VAR Network will put together the best price quotes and handle the contractual paperwork. For literally a few minutes work on your part, you can enhance your income with a cut of the monthly commissions on any line services your customers order.

Whether you're an independent professional or manage a good size consulting firm, it's well worth your while to take a few minutes and check out the VAR Partner Network. That will give you an idea of the range of products and services covered and a view of the online customer interface.