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VoIP
VoIP
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Voice Over IP Solutions |
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Thank you for
browsing by True Data and considering us for your VoIP needs. Most
customers come to us with specific needs. The sales & support
solutions we provide are:
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Hardware
to add to your existing phone system to VoIP enable it
(digital & analog gateways) for both VoIP Station and VoIP
Trunk usage. |
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Hardware/Software to provide specific VoIP services (like
skype gateways or trunking solutions to add VoIP trunks to
IP Carriers like Vonage or Broadvoice ) into your existing
phone system. |
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VoIP hard
& software
phones. |
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Dialogic © HMP , PCI, & CPCI, VoIP Systems, Servers
& Solutions. |
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AI-Logix & Audiocodes VoIP call-recording and
gateway solutions. |
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Vertical Networks “TeleVantage”
software-based (MS Windows & MS SQL) SMB IP-enabled
telephone systems. |
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Zulty’s
appliance-based (small 1U systems) SMB IP-enabled telephone
systems. |
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8. |
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Sphere
Communications software-based pure VoIP phone systems and
enterprise gateways and failover solutions. |
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9. |
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Avaya IP
switch components. |
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If you don’t know
exactly to proceed, please either call us at 800-331-3307 or
click
here to shoot us an email with your question(s). Please let us know
what you have currently and what you are trying to achieve. We’ll be
back to you shortly with answers and/or suggestions.
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What is VoIP?
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Just a few years
ago, computer networks used many different protocols for
communication. There was IPX/SPX for Netware Networks, NetBEUI
for Windows networks, and IP (Internet Protocol) for Sun
Microsystems networks and the Internet in general. As a result
of the Internet’s growing popularity, just about everyone
standardized on IP for transmitting data on local and wide-area
networks. IP became the de-facto standard by which computers
“talked” to each other. The technology is simple: A single piece
of information is broken down into smaller pieces called
“packets”. The packets are encoded with a destination address
then sent on their way to the destination. Sometimes packets
will be sent over different “routes” but they will still end up
at the same destination. They are then reassembled into the
original piece of information and delivered to the recipient.
It’s kind of like disassembling your car in Los Angeles,
shipping the pieces to Chicago via different carriers, then
reassembling the car in Chicago and driving it off. The good
news is that the process is transparent to you.
Until VOIP, the methods for transmitting voice were vastly
different than those used to transmit data. They were mutually
exclusive and to transmit both on a single line (like a T1 for
example) you had to split the T1 into two different channels and
use expensive equipment to “channelize” the information. The
point is that you did not transmit voice over your network
without great costs and the involvement of one or more
engineers.
VOIP has simplified all this. VOIP is accomplished by a piece of
hardware or software converting your voice into IP packets,
sending them shooting to the destination across your regular
network or Internet lines, then reassembling and reconverting
them into voice. It’s the word “hello” converted to IP, sent
across your computer network, then reconverted into “hello”
again. Conversations can be carried-on in a fairly normal
bidirectional manner using VOIP.
The Advantages of VOIP?
The first advantage is, of course, that the call’s free. No Long
Distance, No Local Toll, No Local Carrier. No SBC, No Verizon,
Etc… Everyone already pays for an Internet connection or uses a
free “hot spot” so there’s no per-call cost beyond this… A
second advantage is that’s it’s all done via network wires. You
don’t have to have voice AND data wiring. You can plug a USB
headset into your PC and have great quality calls from your
network or anyplace that has Internet (with your laptop). From a
business standpoint, you can have numerous work-from-home people
in a workgroup using VOIP and costing you nada, bagel, zip in
phone charges. Or you could set up a customer service center in
another country that pays individuals twenty dollars a day to
take your orders or solve your customer service issues. The cost
of back-hauling all those calls from your San Diego office to
New Delhi, India? Two good Internet connections, and some fairly
inexpensive equipment. That is a LOT less expensive than paying
either long distance through a standard carrier OR paying
seventy people US wages.
VOIP Limitations
There
have
always been two significant limitations of VOIP: Cost and
Quality of Service. Both are getting more palatable and it seems
like we’ve landed at a cost and quality point that most users
are willing to jump into VOIP. A simple rule of thumb is “if the
data connection is good and fast, the VOIP will be too…”. A
dial-up or Satellite
connection is likely to yield poor quality and unusable service. |
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How To VoIP: |
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Remember that you have to convert the voice to data then you or
someone else has to reconvert it back to voice and ring the physical phones again. This
conversion can be done via hardware or software. The rule of
thumb is that hardware provides better quality and can handle
more simultaneous connections than software. There are phones
that do the conversion on the phone itself. There are “gateways”
that have phone plugs on one side and a network jack on the
other. There are PCI cards for the PC that your can add to your
computer or PC-based phone system. There are PCI cards or
modules that fit into conventional phone systems. You can also
do the conversion by using the processor on your computer and
using software to do the conversion. Microsoft NetMeeting does
this. Skype does this, Dialogic has developed software technology
called HMP (Host Media Processing) that will make almost
exclusive-use of the computer’s processor for the VoIP conversion
process.
Another thing to remember is that you’re still going to need to
hook into the PSTN (Public Switched Telephone Network) somewhere
and THAT will require some hardware. Take our example of a
customer service agent in India. You have a call come into your
VoIP-enabled TeleVantage phone system (via regular analog telephone lines) from someone using a regular phone. Your system picks up the analog line, plays a standard “please wait a moment” greeting, converts the ring (and subsequent conversation) to VoIP, then sends “ring” signals to 20 agents in India over the Internet using VoIP. You
have a “gateway” box in a small office in India that is now
reconverting the “ring” signals into 20 real phones ringing.
Someone picks up, the call is connected and voila! Free
communication. You needed hardware (in this case a PCI card in
your phone system here) to convert the regular voice signals
into VOIP and transmit them over the Internet to India and a gateway box in India to reconvert all the packets
back to voice. With phone systems like TeleVantage, you can mix
and match analog, digital, and VOIP. You could have some users
using the TeleVantage “soft-phone” (which uses the sound card
and speakers on your PC)) and a USB phone or headset connected
to the PC’s of others, and some others using a gateway with
standard phones attached, and some standard analog or digital
phones attached to a standard analog card in the server. You
could add another 25 agents working out of their homes on a
variety of hardware or software including small gateways, IP
phones or soft phones (like TeleVantage soft-phone or Microsoft Net Meeting). The point is that you can create a group of people
doing the same thing in a truly flexible and mixed-media
environment WITHOUT the massive telecommunication
expenses normally associated with mixed-media, in-home or
off-shore deployments.
What is Vonage?
Vonage is a service that for X price per month will be BOTH ENDS of your VoIP gateway. They will REPLACE your existing phone service. They will provide you a “VoIP gateway box” with the service. The VoIP gateway box has (for the purpose of this dialog) two connections: 1=phone jack 2=ethernet. You open the panel in your house or business that has the set(s) of wires that come from the phone company. You unplug these wires from the phone company and jack your entire house into the phone jack – side of the gateway box. You then plug the Ethernet-side of the box into your Internet connection and Vonage now provides your telephone service. Here’s how it works: The gateway provides “dialtone” and “ring” for your house phones. It also converts your voice into IP Packets. So….. You pick up the phone and hear dialtone that is being provided by the box. You dial a number and the box transmits this number (across your internet service) to Vonage. Their servers dial for you on the PSTN (old phone network), and connect your call to grandma who will NEVER have VoIP. Your voice is being converted to IP and converted back again at the Vonage Server Site. Welcome to the 21st century. When a call comes into the number that Vonage provides for you, they open a connection to your gateway, tell it to “ring”. Then when you pick up, they connect the call over IP and you have your conversation. The winner? You pay 25.00 a month for your phone service with unlimited nationwide calling (which is STILL HIGH). The loser? If the local phone company doesn’t have your Internet Service contract then they just lost a customer. All that copper to your house they have been maintaining for eighty years just became useless and they’re in trouble.
What is Skype?
Skype is a VOIP software client that uses proprietary SIP encoding. They are a point-to-point software-only solution that does not currently interface with the open standards (whether H.323 or Std. SIP) used by most “regular” VoIP phones and services. Skype IS cool for PC-to-PC calls. It works like instant messengers using one big Skype-Hosted phone book so calling someone else is super easy. THAT is the difference that Skype provides: They have merged phone and email “naming conventions” so john@email.com replaces (000)000-0000. Quality, with Skype, is better than most for software-only solutions. There are also services that provide what’s called a “Skype-Out” service to connect Skype users to the PSTN. If you subscribe to a “Skype-Out” service, it is similar to subscribing to Vonage except you don’t have a gateway at your house. It always needs to be connected to a computer or proprietary “skype-phone” at your house or business.
I still have questions:
We know it can be confusing. True Data has been using and selling special-purpose VoIP for almost a decade. That’s WAY BEFORE it was a popular (or even remotely workable) technology for standard users or businesses. We sell both the TeleVantage and Vertical IP switches, numerous “gateway” boxes from a variety of vendors, phones from a variety of vendors, PCI cards from Dialogic, AudioCODES and AI-Logix, and Avaya IP phones and add-in modules. Just call us, we can usually assess your needs and make a suggestion in under five minutes. If we don’t have the products you need, we’d be happy to suggest whatever might work best for you even if it’s something we don’t sell. |
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