Is there more to IP telephony than saving money?
Yes, there is more to IP Telephony than saving $. There is more to IP Telephony than dial-tone. There is more to IP Telephony than a single network.
All of these claims are true. IP Telephony saves $ in maintenance costs, and operations because IP PBXs can be managed remotely, self-administered with browser interactions to enable password reset, hunt group definition and similar features. The ease with which these services can be activated means that they are likely to be ACTUALLY USED!
Voip for enterprise hasn't been about saving $ on long distance in quite some time. Although the regulatory advantages of Vonage and other VoIP providers for consumers delivers a significant cost advantage, it doesn't do much for businesses, since the vast majority of business uses a private network for long distance and small businesses are usually local businesses, with little or no need for long distance.
Certainly IP PBXs are more than dial-tone. The application can more easily support innovative features like Find Me Follow Me, hot desking (being logged into one phone one day, and logged into another phone in a different location the next day – all with the same telephone number) and high availability only if you want to pay for it.
3Com proved that there's more to a 'converged' network than voice and data on the same network. Several features of an integrated 'converged' network are, in fact required to meet the users' expectations for quality audio, and to take advantage of important quality features like wide-band audio. Voice and data traffic should be segmented onto different virtual LANs. They could share the same switching infrastructure within the campus, but, they need to be segregated for security and performance/quality reasons. Email downloads can peak the available bandwidth leaving nothing for steady-rate voice applications. You might recognize these symptoms as choppy audio.
Segmenting means the switching network creates two logical networks – voice and data – and allows each to max-out their allocations, but without affecting the other. Security-wise, segmentation also delivers a degree of isolation of voice applications, servers and infrastructure that helps to prevent availability impacts as a result of distributed denial of service attack.
IP Telephony saves $, enables new applications and services that makes employees more productive and strengthens customer interactions.
