Business VoIP Solution .... What Does It Really Mean?

A business voip solution is an alternative to a traditional switched-voice service. Instead of using dedicated trunks between PBXs, you can share the bandwidth with your data services, making better use of the available capacity. With prioritization techniques, you can ensure that your voice traffic gets through the network in the appropriate time to maintain voice quality.

For a typical internet telephony application, assume that you have a number of offices that need to communicate with each other. The telephony traffic can be carried across the internet or across a third party network or VPN .... and be delivered to the distant end without using the PSTN or a leased line. It depends on what you want to achieve.

You can have an IP PBX for internal use only, with all your staff connected over the same LAN infrastructure as they use for data - separating voice and data traffic by using VLANs, with external access to the PSTN. If you have more than one office, you can link them using leased T1 or DS3 bandwidth lines, metro ethernet or xDSL in the same way as you would for a data service - VoIP is, after all, voice packets being transported in the same way as data packets.

As the VoIP traffic is handled just like any other data traffic, it doesn't really matter where your PBX is located, just as you can have a hosted server for your data, you can have a hosted server for your VoIP. You can have the IPPBX in your office or in a data centre, it makes no difference.

SIP trunking? Now there's a buzz phrase. SIP is a signaling protocol in the same way as H.323 or QSIG are protocols. SIP is a standard and lots of manufacturers intrepret the standard in their own way but, fortunately, lots of the SIP interpretations work together.

Session Initiation Protocol works over IP and should enable replacement of PSTN trunks by the internet. So, again, voice traffic can go over the internet instead of the PSTN with a resulting saving in cost.

Don't forget though, that the internet is unregulated and unmanaged. Voice traffic is sensitive to packet loss, delay and jitter (variation in delay). So at peak times ( just after school in the evenings and on weekends) your voice traffic may break up. Meaning it would be worthwhile looking at having a managed network service to guarantee the quality of your voice traffic for those critical calls.

VoIP works between products from the same manufacturer and sometimes it works between manufacturers. Some manufacturers have produced interfaces and some third parties will provide gateways to enable collaboration. My recommendation would be to check first.

Hardware? Go for something that lots of other people use.. Cisco, Avaya, Alcatel. Cisco started in data and moved into voice. Avaya and Alcatel started in voice and moved into IP data. They have their own ways of implementing VoIP. Cisco is only VoIP. Avaya and Alcatel can give you a migration from traditional voice, reusing handsets from their analog and digital services adding IP telephones as the transition continues. IP telephone handsets are expensive.

For more help in designing a business VoIP solution for your network .... I recommend taking advantage of the services available here:

Business VoIP Solution

Their assistance is free and and they often can find special deals from providers in your specific location.