Smith On VoIP

Ted Wallingford Is One of Best In the VoIP Business

Ted is an enterprise systems consultant, a writer, a blogger, and an authority on Voice over IP. His books include O’Reilly’s Switching to VoIP and Voip Hacks, and he’s a contributor to both VoIPfan.com, where he maintains a weblog, and to Macworld Magazine.

His business consulting experience includes building VoIP-based telephone systems and converged networks, employing VoIP to enhance mobile communications, and implementing Quality of Service measures for challenging IP communications scenarios such as wireless and VPN. A former I.T. manager and administrator, Ted has consulted in construction, publishing, advertising, manufacturing, and health care industries. He is currently an independant networking consultant, available for your engagement.

A few weeks ago, I interviewed Ted about the recent bad press VoIP has been receiving, the most common VoIP mis-conceptions, and other VoIP related topics.

Smith: What are your thoughts on all of the recent articles written by those outside of the VoIP industry that seem to paint VoIP as a villianous technology?

Wallingford:There are articles that are plain misinformed, and that’s forgivable. I remember a couple of years ago Kim Komando wrote an article blasting VoIP. In this article, she advised people not to use VoIP services until E911 was integrated and proven, despite there being many cases where VoIP service, even without E911, makes total sense. Skype is a case in point. I think a lot of this boils down to change. People often display an attitude of hostility when change is in the works.

Smith: What is the biggest mis-conception businesses have about VoIP?

Wallingford: Probably the biggest misconception I see is this: enterprise decision-
makers seem to assuming an automatic decrease in quality when considering a change to VoIP telephony. It’s as if they’re bracing themselves for the worst, because they’ve heard horror stories from others. In reality, the majority of VoIP implementations that result in reduced quality did so because the implementors didn’t pay attention to Quality of Service, or because the customer didn’t care enough to equip his network for QoS. So the misconception is that VoIP telephony will work “good enough” without a QoS policy in force.

Smith: What is the number one mistake made by most companies looking to deploy a voip solution?

Wallingford: Probably attempting to handle all planning and provisioning in-house. Sure, your typical enterprise probably has a networking guru or two, but the expertise that’s required to properly integrate VoIP–the knowledge of which protocols are best for which circumstance, and so on–isn’t the kind of expertise your typical in-house guru is going to have. Not to mention the accountability factor. Outside parties are always held to higher account than employees.

Smith: Give us your top 5 “VoIP best practices”

Wallingford: If we’re talking in the enterprise space, here’s what I would suggest.

1. If you’re not using SIP you’re making a mistake. The longevity of your chosen VoIP platform will be dictated by interoperability and protocol support. And SIP is the both the least-common denominator for interop as well as the most extensible signaling protocol to date
for VoIP. Be sure your chosen vendor can support SIP today.

2. Plan for Quality of Service provisions on your network, as QoS is key to the success of your new voice system.

3. Engage an integrator that you can retain for support even after the system is built and working.

4. Farm out the aspects of the integration for which you don’t have in-house expertise, and don’t feel bad about it. Very rarely has anybody actually saved money by taking the do-it-yourself approach.

5. Don’t try to find ways of “not recabling” areas that need to be recabled. This will only cost you more in the long-run.

Smith: What was the most important event in the VoIP industry this year (2006)?

Wallingford: Interestingly, there are probably three events of equal significance, and they may not be the one’s you’re thinking of. Nokia’s introduction of quad-band phones with SIP and WiFI is huge, as it’s a harbinger for the ubiquity of SIP and IP in the coming years. The
closer we see this stuff getting to the consumer level, the more significant the impact is, so Nokia’s support of an open SIP client on certain phones is pretty significant. The second item of
significance, to me anyway, was the widespread availability of SIP-based WiFi phones of good quality. Prior to 2006, the WiFi phones that were available were either non-SIP or just plain bad. Not so any longer. The third item of significance was Skype’s offer of unlimited free calling until the end of the year. This got millions of people hooked on Skype, literally, and bodes well for their 2007.

Smith: 2007 predictions for the VoIP industry?

Wallingford: I think Vonage will continue to lose money until they can get their acquisition costs down and their retention up. Part of this might mean partnering with a scrappy second-tier wireless carrier (Revol maybe?) in order to start reeling in some low-cost revenue from WIFi.
I also think hosted VoIP is just at the tip of the iceberg stage. It will be interesting to see how folks like GlobalTouch and InfoTelus make out in 2007. I think they’re going to turn a profit, if not in 2007 then soon. Hosted VoIP is a volume business model, and with the right volume of customers, these guys will eventually make money.

Smith: Do you think a service such as Skype will ever be suitable as a primary form of business communication for small medium businesses?

Wallingford: Not in its present form. It still has the fundamental drawback of being tied to a PC or Mac, in most cases. Plus, it’s too secretive to become pervasive. There are no Skype techno-enthusiasts out there evangelizing it because Skype is keeping all its dirty secrets to itself. The inner-workings of Skype would have to be exposed in order for widespread business use to become common. If we knew how it worked, we could provide QoS measures, and then it would be an acceptable primary telephony solution for businesses. (They do have call-transfers now, with 3.0, which would’ve been mmy other gotcha…)

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