One more thing you must know about VoIP

Information Week, 7/3/06: 5 Things You Must Know About VoIP

I'm surprised to see more than one publication write about, provide details/guidance to readers, about VoIP, and not mention one critical piece of any VoIP deployment: POWER

Is it that research respondents were all from large enterprises with the capability and capacity to purchase/provide their own power? What about businesses that rely on utility power providers?

I don't know if all large companies actually control their supply of power, but I believe that beyond the UPS (uninterruptible power supply), majority of businesses have absolutely no control of this all important/critical resource. Why the big fuss? In a power loss, don't all systems shut down anyway? True, but in the world of "legacy" POTs phone lines, not all business activity shuts down, the phone will still ring, and the company can still provide some level of service. Ever seen the movie, "The Day After Tomorrow"? - all phones were down, except for the old pay phone in the basement....

I would imagine such a critical resource should be mentioned in it's own bullet point - maybe supplanting the first item in the article regarding VoIP's "inevitability" or, at the very least, deserves a mention in the 2nd point referencing VoIP's cost - you either increase your power usage, and/or necessitate some type of power architecture upgrade. Bottom line: it must be considered. It is one more thing you need to know about VoIP.

I did my own evaluation of VoIP about 2 - 3 years ago. After being wowed with the possibilities, claimed savings in toll-call costs, a relatively manageable price tag, it was almost a shoe in. We were likewise in the midst of a move to a new location, which the company purchased (not leased). This gave us the unique opportunity to build out our network architecture pretty much any way we wanted - an empty shell of a building, no shared space, full access to walls for cabling, etc. etc. In other words, it would have been the "ideal" time to get this new technology in.

We're a small business looking for ways to manage costs and increase efficiency, and in the final phase, where I overlayed our "old" POTS system with the new, I was also "guilty" of overlooking power needs. The last question (probably should have been the first) I had was, in the event of a power loss, for whatever reason, is this system resilient? The answer, is simply NO. We can install all the redundancy in hardware, get the best in switches, routers, management software, etc., bring in a networking guru to properly segment the LAN for maximum efficiency, but NONE of this matters much if power goes down. When the power goes down, you go dark. With POTs, even if our UPS systems go down, the phone still rings, business can still move.

Don't get me wrong, VoIP is definitely an enabling technology. We have a very small deployment of VoIP, through a service provider. So far it's doing well - there are toll savings and voice quality is perfect (can't distinguish from land line). But at least in our case, it is not an "inevitable" technology that will replace our old/legacy communication systems, yeah the plain old POTS phone, rather, work side-by-side with it.