Friday, 25 May 2012

VoIP's Drawbacks - Should They Be Holding You Back?

Though VoIP is a wonderful and convenient option for business phone systems in many respects, it does still have a few problems. Discussing the issues rather than the advantages may help you decide whether or not it's worth taking the plunge and committing your office to a VoIP phone system.

The main problem with VoIP is that it's dependent on more external resources to continue operating. There is no VoIP phone that will work without both the internet and electricity, while landline phones will continue operating as long as the phone line is fine (and you have a corded phone which does not need a power source). If your internet goes down, you are basically unable to continue business while waiting for it to be repaired. Similarly, electricity is required to power the servers and keep your phones live.

For many of us, though, this is a reality of life; work cannot continue without internet access any longer. We are too dependent on the internet for research and communication; many careers are completely internet and PC based. If you can't work without your email either, it isn't a huge risk to put your phone line over your internet as well. In that case, the savings are probably worth it. If your work is mainly offline, however, or you work in an area with unreliable broadband access, you may find that it makes more sense to stick with a traditional phone line.

Sound quality is also considered by many to be a disadvantage of VoIP services. Again, however, this is completely dependent upon your individual set-up. Those with slower broadband services or lower quality wire, which limits broadband speed, will always suffer with call quality more than those with the highest quality lines and the highest allowance internet packages. In both cases, however, VoIP is still a completely viable option; occasional echoing is not going to disrupt your phone calls enough to make them inoperable.

Another disadvantage is that each and every phone needs to have a computer or at least a server running for it to work. They must all be hooked up through Ethernet ports or through a PC which is accessing the internet. Individual requirements vary but if your office doesn't have a PC for each person who needs a phone, you may be forced to buy extra hardware. Again, most offices do have a PC for each and every person, so this should not be a problem in the modern office.

Lastly, a serious disadvantage of VoIP is that it has no emergency calling function. Simply put, your VoIP phone is not in the security network and cannot be relied upon to reach emergency numbers. Emergency responders will also be completely unable to determine your location from your phone number, which they can and will do in an emergency with a regular landline phone. It's essential that every office running on VoIP has one landline phone in case of emergencies.

While VoIP has a few drawbacks, it does provide exceptional cost savings and convenience for many potential users. Consider carefully whether these disadvantages seriously harm VoIP's distinct advantages for your company.

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Tag: VOIP drawbacks, what is the drawbacks of voips, why voip, voip progblems

Source: Ezine

Saturday, 19 May 2012

VoIP Disadvantages

Most of us are aware of the basics and underlying mechanisms of Voice Over Internet Protocol technology. For those who are not up-to-date with its details, VoIP is a system that integrates various communication protocols and transmission technologies to offer the facility of conducting voice calls and multimedia sessions using one's Internet connection. Also synonymously referred to as Internet telephony, IP telephony, Voice over Broadband (VoBB), broadband phone and broadband telephony, Voice Over IP is generally implemented through the media of any of these six protocols - IP Multimedia Subsystem (IPS), Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), Multimedia Gateway Control Protocol (MGCP), Session Description Protocol (SDP), H.323 and Real Time Transport Protocol (RTP).

Since the emergence of this coming-of-age communication and multimedia technology, everyone's been talking about the advantages of VoIP such as low operating cost, flexibility of operation, more multitasking options, versatile utility, etc. However, since every coin has two faces, VoIP disadvantages are as significant, if not more, as VoIP advantages! Let's take a detailed tour of the VoIP drawbacks to understand the areas where it falls short of its promised deliverables and what are the reasons behind such lacunae. Time to lift the cover off the ugly side of VoIP!

Disadvantages of VoIP

As far as the VoIP advantages are concerned, the following VoIP drawbacks, mostly owing to practical infrastructure scenarios and technical reasons, emerge as the biggest disadvantages of VoIP that sometimes outweigh the benefits promised by this technology. Let's look at each lacuna in detail.

Service Quality: Lack of a network based service mechanism is one of the biggest VoIP disadvantages as due to the absence of a network based service, chances of loss of data packets and distortion of data sequence are increased. Due to these reasons, VoIP services often fail to tackle issues of jitter and latency.

Dependency on Power: As opposed to conventional telephones whose lines are directly connected to the telephone company's phone lines, VoIP adapters are connected to modems and routers which function as long as they are powered by locally generated electricity. A power failure, thus, means that you cannot use the VoIP service to make a call and have to wait till power is restored. On the other hand, in case of conventional analog telephone services, no such local power source is necessary and communication can be established and continued despite power disruptions.

Challenge of Portability: One of the major VoIP drawbacks is that while VoIP works on the Least Cost Routing principle, calls made over VoIP often find it difficult to reach their destinations if such destinations happen to be numbers registered with conventional mobile carriers and service providers.

Difficulty in Calling Emergency Numbers: Internet protocols find it hard to pinpoint network users on the basis of geographical location. Due to this reason, emergency calls often get routed outside the convenient geographical reach rather than getting connected to the nearest call center. Sometimes, emergency calls may get directed to non-emergency phone lines of the concerned department and the time lost because of such an occurrence can be detrimental and endangering! Suppose you've been cut by broken glass and the wound is bleeding profusely since you've punctured a vein - wouldn't you prefer to contact the emergency and trauma center of the hospital directly rather than calling the billing department and waiting till your call gets routed to the appropriate department? And all this time, you'd be bleeding nonstop! Don't you think that's scary and dangerous?

Limited Faxing Capability: Sending fax over VoIP is not very effective as the voice codecs used by VoIP technology are not designed for, and conducive to, transmitting fax messages. These codecs are fashioned to be able to convert an analog human voice model into a digital format.

Difficulty in Calling 911: The emergency service was designed on the basis of PSTN network and was meant to be easily accessible by all telephones on the network. PSTN networks work geographically and any PSTN telephone connection would be registered under a local address. That way, even if a caller of 911 isn't able to speak to the operator for some reason, the operator can still locate the geographic location and local address based upon the PSTN telephone number from which the call was placed. Now, VoIP works on the basis of IP address rather than local address and the distribution of VoIP services is not based upon geographical location either. Therefore, it becomes difficult to trace the location of a call as a particular geographical location cannot be pulled out of the information an IP address provides as these two are, in no way, connected.

That precisely covers the major VoIP disadvantages and the reasons behind them. Some other challenges like IP and network security issues, PSTN integration and caller identification have been tackled to a certain extent and soon, these are expected to become non-issues. Hope the same happens to the other aforementioned concerns as well. Once the above mentioned drawbacks get corrected, VoIP would be the undisputed technology and service choice for voice communication and multimedia interactions!

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Tag: voip test, voip disadvantages,  Disadvantages of VoIP

Source: Buzzle.com By Ishani Chatterjee Shukla

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