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 NEWSIP telephony is still about the money By Stephen Lee May 25, 2001 1:01 pm PT  EVER SINCE VOIP (voice over IP) first appeared on the scene, the technology has been stigmatized by the perception that IP telephony is only about saving money. Recent attempts to dispel this idea focus on the technology's rich feature set, with vendors touting their IP telephony solutions as a kind of voice-based Internet, complete with calendaring, e-mail, and advanced searching and scrolling features.
"The Internet craze is over," Fraley says. "We're back to fundamental business issues. If I can get something cheaper in a TDM [time-division multiplexing] product, why would I go to IP -- even if it gives me a couple of gee-whiz features?" La Jolla Country Day School, a kindergarten through 12th grade private school in La Jolla, Calif., is a case in point. The school adopted Alcatel's VOIP solution after a safety audit recommended that phone services be available in more classrooms. "If there was an emergency, you might have to walk down two or three buildings to get to a phone, even to make a 911 call," explains Quoc Vo, the school's IT manager. It soon became apparent that the school could not extend its legacy PBX phone system without running up huge costs: pulling new phone wires through all of the campus's various structures would have been enormously expensive. Some of the old buildings simply could not accommodate new wires, and the main patch panel, into which all phone lines were plugged, was already at full capacity. Instead, La Jolla Country Day laid a new phone system atop its existing IP network, which had recently been upgraded with fiber-optic cable. And contrary to popular belief, Vo says the school found that deploying VOIP was actually easier than deploying a traditional PBX-based phone system. "The convenience of plugging a phone in anywhere we had a computer was the main attraction [of VOIP]" says Vo, noting that because the IP phones look and act like regular phones, the school did not incur extra training costs. "We had enough network drops in all the classrooms, but we didn't have any phone drops. So it was easier for us to plug a hard IP phone into the network ports." For Ecolab, a cleaning-products maker based in Eden Prairie, Minn., "cost savings were the driving factor" in choosing VOIP as well, says Sandy Eide, the company's senior telecom analyst. Ecolab was attracted by the prospect of saving money on international calls and has been using a VOIP system from Envoda since February. But some concerns still linger about VOIP's voice quality. "When users pick up the phone, there's a level of quality that they've grown to expect," explains John Freres, president of N2N Solutions, a Schaumburg, Ill.-based networking services company that uses Cisco's VOIP system. "If you can't deliver [the same level] of service that people are used to getting in a legacy environment, people will be reluctant to make the change." As for the new features that VOIP can enable, La Jolla Country Day School is considering a group paging system so teachers can be connected with mobile phones while on yard duty, Vo says, and Ecolab may eventually deliver streaming video via its new VOIP infrastructure. But neither considers these high-end features a key reason to invest in IP telephony. "[QoS (quality of service)] is extremely important, but the majority of our users don't even know they're going out over IP," Eide adds.  RELATED ARTICLES  VOIP moving from sci-fi to reality VOIP still a tough call SPONSORED WHITE PAPERS 
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