John Linton
.....a blast from the past or the way of the future?
We have been looking at various ways to meet the demand from small and medium business for the provision of 'hassleless' VoIP services. Our views to date have been to provide Cisco/Linksys or Cisco/X 'boxes' and hand sets as 'standalone solutions' to customers who ask for an Exetel solution. This is the approach we took for our own services (except we used a Mitel VoIP PABX) some four years ago and it has worked well for us very successfully ever since. However it has become apparent that more companies than I would have thought are asking for a "Hosted VoIP" solution - a concept I haven't come across since the old Telstra hosted service of the late 1990s/early 2000s. That service was a failure (at least in terms of take up) but quite possibly that had more to do with Telstra's pricing than the functionality/reliability of the service.
The premise behind the old Telstra services was that you could have all the functionality of a high end/very expensive PABX without having to pony up mega dollars for the hardware but simply rent telephone handsets from Telstra that were connected (by PSTN or ISDN lines) to some super high end PABX in some Telstra office somewhere. No hardware on your own premises, no expensive PABX maintenance contracts and ideal for companies with multiple small offices - every line around Australia could make 'internal/no cost' calls to each other's handsets. To go further than that is to over tax my memory of a service I was only peripherally aware of some ten years ago. But that sums up the 'appeal' of hosted PABX services which are re-appearing today...a very early example of "cloud computing"?
Is it a good idea? I wouldn't have thought so as I have never seen any problems with replacing an ISDN/PSTN PABX with a much simpler VoIP switch which has all the functionality of a high end PABX at a tenth of the price and has the added advantage of allowing data base integration with all the huge amount of additional functionality that brings - we literally couldn't operate Exetel today without those dozens of additional automated functions. However I am absolutely not a typical person in terms of looking at technology solutions for a company and the more typical person is apparently reluctant to take the views I hold.
So we 'decided' yesterday to explore two options for our own customers who wanted to take a very cautious approach to using VoIP within their company. We will 'slice off' a sub set of our own VoIP functionalities and offer a 'hosted' VoIP solution to companies that want the cost advantages of VoIP call costs plus the functionality of a high end PABX with no 'exposure' to the failure of VoIP hardware and Ethernet data links. This is easily and simply accomplished by the customer buying some Cisco handsets which they plug into their LAN and making and receiving calls over those hand sets. They leave their current PABX/Keystation and current handsets in place (and keep paying for their PSTN/ISDN lines until they are satisfied that VoIP really is reliable and and data links are as reliable as telephone lines and there is no need to incur the expenses of renting lines any more.
If I think back 4 - 5 years when we were deciding to replace our 'traditional' PABX and phone lines with VoIP this cautious approach might well have appealed to me. This approach allows an IT manager to buy a single handset to test the functionality and demonstrate the call quality to other people within the company without disturbing any current user....and then add additional users in any time frame required. It allows, via MoIP, for any mobile user to become part of the company telephone network from anywhere in Australia and any home based employees to do the same.
Maybe this is THE way of breaking through the reluctance of Australian companies to use VoIP?
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