VoIP Toolkit
Story: VoIP: Paying the price for cheap calls
Posted by: Albert Gouyet (Tuesday 16 August 2005, 12:59 PM)
I was very interested to read Ian Williams’ take on the adoption of internet telephony, and support his view that one of the biggest inhibitors to the growth of VoIP is the question of availability. Telephony "dial-tone" requirements for VoIP will raise the bar for performance and increase the complexity of the network.
I think it can be agreed that network hiccups can be a frustrating phenomenon regardless of when and where they occur. Despite the problems they nurture, however, they seem to have become a widely embedded and accepted facet of organisational culture. Today, if the always-on network is disrupted, few people will even notice. Do you really care if your email took a few minutes to be delivered, or that your browser page did not load? Things inevitably get slow(er) at peak times, but in truth, these performance inconsistencies are considered minor annoyances. Conversely, I don’t think the same would be true if you went to pick up the phone and there was no dial tone. With VoIP, people will notice if a connection takes more than 500ms or if the VoIP phone cannot get an address on the network.
Consider this example; if you were relying solely on VoIP to place an emergency services call, a disrupted internet connection could be potentially disastrous. An extreme example perhaps, but the underlying premise is the same; having your avenues for communication severed, for any period of time, can be a costly and dangerous thing for business. That said, VoIP in itself is not an inherently risky technology. Essentially, it is more a case of network availability. If all of an organisations’ communication devices, such as voice, fax and email, are 100% reliant on a singular network, the availability of that network does become mission critical to the business.
Therefore, the bigger picture for rolling out VoIP is not whether or not companies can protect themselves from any specific security attack; rather, it is more a case of investing in the network infrastructure to ensure your data network is capable of handling the increased complexity.
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