Voice Over IP or IP Telephony?
You’d be forgiven for thinking that there’s something wrong with you if you haven’t rushed headlong down the LAN telephony path. Sometimes it seems it would be easier to deploy it than keep explaining why you haven’t. Admitting to not having an IP telephony deployment—not even a pilot!—to people you meet at IT seminars and trade shows is a bit like admitting you don’t own a television, and telephone your friends for a chat instead of sending emails. There are good reasons to implement VoIP, whether it’s a full-blown IP telephony deployment or not (and we’ll look at what the significance of the two are in a minute). There are also times when it’s best not to, or when it might suit part of your business, but not all. So let’s start with some basic criteria to determine what we’re talking about.
VoIP vs IP telephony You’ll find a lot of people talking about Voice over IP and IP telephony (or LAN telephony) interchangeably. This is wrong. Just to get the terminology sorted out, so you can talk to vendors without them patronising you, Voice over IP, Voice over Frame, and Voice over ATM, are technologies that have been around for a long time to let you use your existing WAN infrastructure to carry voice traffic between PBXs, or to provide long-line extension services from a remote handset to a PBX. It’s a cost-saving exercise, nothing more. Nothing in the telephone handset or PBX side of things changes one iota. You still have analogue (or proprietary digital feature set) phones, and your PBX keeps all its existing line and trunk cards, numbering plans and route maps... more >>>