By now VoIP is something that almost everyone has heard of; however, there is still a lot of confusion about what it is exactly. Most people will associate VoIP with Skype. While Skype is using VoIP technologies, it is still merely an implementation of VoIP.

VoIP is an acronym for: Voice Over Internet Protocol (IP). It is purely used to describe a technology and not a product in itself. VoIP falls in two main categories:

• Internet Telephony
• IP telephony

Internet Telephony is communications purely over the Internet. Voice calls are converted to IP packets and sent over the Internet to the other end. Skype is a good example of Internet Telephony. The main problem with Internet Telephony is that quality is not guaranteed. Calls drop, sometimes there is a lag between calls, etc. This is especially bad if your Internet connection is unreliable. While this is fine for home users, it is not acceptable for business users.

IP Telephony is communications based on an IP network, which terminates outbound calls over the PSTN. This works great for businesses as all IP communications travel over networks they can control and quality can be guaranteed.

Products

We install and support products from two big players in the VoIP industry: Cisco and Asterisk.

Cisco
Cisco is a multinational corporation, started in 1984. Recently Cisco has started to focus on the SMB's and invested $2billion to penetrate the SMB market. This has resulted in Enterprise quality products becoming affordable to smaller businesses that require trusted hardware to run their telephony equipment. Cisco has also developed many applications to run on their IP Telephony equipment to increase productivity in their Unified Communications range.

Cisco is also currently offering leasing and hire purchase on Cisco projects, which roughly translates to 0% finance over 3 years. This means you can see a return on your investment from day 1.

Asterisk
Asterisk is an open sourced VoIP platform produced by Digium, which is rapidly gaining momentum. Because it is open source, it is very popular with smaller businesses because of the low cost to install and maintain. It has also proved itself over the last few years and is the platform used by an Emergency Response team in South Africa.

Hosted PBX
For companies requiring 5 or less handsets, we normally recommend our Hosted PBX platform. This negates the need to own and maintain a call management system on-site, lowering the total cost of ownership.

How does it work?

Traditional PBX systems (TDM's) use circuits to connect the caller to the recipient over the PSTN (Public Switched Telephone Network). Think of it as various points (exchanges) that connect to each other with a cable that goes from point to point until the destination is reached. When you speak on the one end your voice is sent over the connection in analogue and heard on the other end. This is very similar to have two tins connected with a string.

IP Telephony (VoIP) is set to change this. Instead of having circuits to connect one end to the other, audio is converted to packets (little bits of audio) and sent over the network. This means that your voice calls travel over your existing computer network and there is no need to maintain two separate infrastructures. Also, because it is integrated with your data network, it also means you can integrate VoIP with your applications. You also have one set of security devices (firewalls) and you need less staff to maintain both your telephone and computer equipment.