This week’s ITLink podcast is called “How to become a VOIP VAR” and my guest is Steve Harvey, who is VP of WW sales for Digium. As many of you might know, Digium is the company that is the commercial face of the popular open source VOIP PBX product Asterisk.
You can listen to the podcast here.
Enterprises wanting to get the most use of Voice over IP need to know the steps involved in hardening their network and Internet infrastructure to get the best results out of their digital voice deployment projects. In this article published today by Computerworld, I talk more about what you need to know, including:
With Vonage, the pioneering Internet phone service, cast into doubt by an unfavorable ruling in a patent infringement lawsuit, this is a good time to look at other options for Internet business calls. In my story this week for the New York Times, I review the various small-business options for VOIP and IP PBX service.
You might also want to read a recent review of Linksys’ IP PBX device in Computerworld here.
Linksys’ low-end IP PBX called the SPA9000 is reviewed in today’s Computerworld.com here. It is a capable system whose diminutive size hides a high level of complexity. While it packs plenty of features, getting some of them to work will require a great deal of patience, reading the manual and trial-and-error experimenting in the brave new world of business IP telephony.
I have been a mostly satisfied Vonage customer for at least four years, having service from them in three states, and one of the reasons why I have a 310 area code even as I live in St. Louis. Today’s story in the STL Post-Dispatch quotes my thoughts about the recent legal wranglings with Verizon trying to put Vonage out of business.
When the local phone companies start lawyering up the competition, you know that they are just getting ready to roll out their own version of VOIP.
From an IT manager friend of mine who is involved in moving his offices across town:
The Voice over IP market is maturing for small businesses, especially those that are tired of paying big bucks for overpriced, proprietary PBX phone systems that lack the ability to scale as a customer’s business grows. This is an excellent opportunity for VARs to get in on the ground floor and make margins in the high 20 – 30% range if they have the right combination of voice and data skills.
In this story for eWeek this month, I talk about ways that VARs can become of this new opportunity for integrated IP PBXs with software from Asterisk.
My quest for better phone service began when I started working from home this January, after I left Tom’s Hardware. I have been a Vonage customer for the past several years, and up until I started working from home and placing demands on the service, was pretty much a happy camper. But now I am caught on the short end of the cable modem, and I suffer on hold for several hours a day as I try to get through to customer disservice. What are the problems? In a word, Adelphia’s cable Internet service sucks. Rarely does a day go by when I can reliable service throughout the day. This has nothing to do with Vonage, but without a decent Internet dial tone, I don’t get any benefit with having Vonage VOIP. (I won’t bore you with the number of times that Adelphia has been out to rewire this and that in my building to get service to a decent enough level.) Lately I have been having problems with some of the IVR systems responding to my touch tones — this never used to happen to me. I don’t know if my phone is going bad, or something odd is happening with Vonage. Now I do a lot of conference calls, and almost all of them require you to input a call ID number via touch tones. Sometimes I get connected. Sometimes I don’t. It has been very frustrating to say the least. One of the reasons I went with Vonage was because of the ability to change my call features using Vonage’s Web site, without ever having to talk to a customer disservice person. But Vonage made some changes that make the site harder to use, and that also has reduced my voice service reliability. So after all of these issues, I thought I would be smart and switch back to a good ole fashioned Verizon land line. They have an all-you-can-call package that isn’t much more than I pay for Vonage. Boy, did I not realize what I was getting into. It took me no time to order the voice and DSL service online on Verizon’s Web site. Might as well just get everything from one place and pay one bill, I thought. What was I thinking? Then the trouble started. When I placed my order, I knew that I wanted a Verizon tech to come into my apartment and make sure that the interior wiring was working correctly. I hadn’t had land line service since we moved in here and didn’t want to take any chances. So I specifically asked for this service, for the tune of about $100. Verizon promptly told me my service would be available the day after I placed my order, and that is when I began to smell a rat. I thought: they probably think, because I am in an existing location that their computers know about, that all they have to do is turn on the dial tone at the central office and I will be good to go. Wrong! Now, the wiring inside my apartment is like a lot of old apartment buildings: in short, a mess. There are jacks with bunches of wires going here and there. I needed that tech to come visit with his tone set and get things connected from the wiring closet downstairs. First I got an email from Verizon verifying my order. Everything was great, I thought: they get the Web and are sending me email. But a careful read through the email was my next frustration: nowhere in this message was the key phone number that my order had assigned. I had chosen the number during the Web ordering process, but of course didn’t write it down. Why was this important? Because without the phone number of my line, there was no way I could track my order via Verizon’s Web-based customer care system. So I waited. The next day, I got a paper confirmation via good ole USPS. This had all sorts of information, including my eventual phone number. Hooray! Now I can sign on and figure out what is going on with my line. But when I did, I got this message: Our records indicate that the account you entered is no longer in service. Please contact your local business for assistance. Okay, so I call the business office and tell them that they still need to send a technician out to hook me up. That was two days ago. No tech came. Today I call and finally get through to someone who can schedule a tech. He comes out, spends about an hour fooling around with the wires in my apartment, and eventually gets me dial tone after rewiring a few things here and there. But that is just half the story. Now I need to find out what happened with my DSL order. Today, I get another email from Verizon, telling me: Our records show that you recently placed an order for Verizon Online DSL. Due to a system malfunction, your order is not complete. We invite you to return to our Web site … I ask Jim, my Verizon tech buddy that I have since bonded with, about whether his order shows that my line has been configured for DSL. Nope. I have to re-order the DSL service. Incredible! Do they really want my business? So I go back online and spend a very frustrating time trying to do this, only to find out that the Verizon Web site thinks my DSL is already a feature on my voice line and I can’t re-order it again. I gotta call their customer disservice line. After waiting on hold for a live person for 30 minutes, I give up. Can they make this any harder? Jim tells me that the DSL guys are a bunch of losers (not in so many words, but I get his drift). So do I really want to give Verizon my business? I think not. While Jim is finishing up with his install of my voice line, I surf on over to Earthlink, and order my DSL package from them. I figure since I know the CEO, I might be able to get some traction in case things don’t work out. (Note 4/24/06: nearly a month later, and I just get a call from Earthlink. Seems that there is some problem with my order. Still no DSL here) How do normal people deal with this stuff? Anyway, I have a new voice number, which I’ll post on my strominator.com blog but here it is in case you need to call me: 310 829 4742. And the funny thing is, when I go to Verizon’s Web site and key in this number, I still get the “account is no longer in service” message. Maybe one of these days Verizon will finally figure out how to really use this new-fangled Web-thingie. A month later, 4/24/06, I get this email from Verizon: <tt> This email is being sent in reference to your contact with Verizon by email during the month of March. We identified a system issue that caused a delay in the receipt of our response to you. We have since corrected the system issue. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact us by clicking on the link below: </tt> Sigh.
Yes, those emails from Gizmo Project were generated by me, but unintentionally. If you are willing to try out this new IM/VOIP software, download the client and give it a whirl. And if you are tempted to run the “Contacts Assistant” realize that it will also scan your address book and send off a batch of emails to your friends and associates asking them to join up.
I am not sure this is kosher, and would suggest that the Linspire folks add a disclaimer or a warning to this assitant before it goes and does the deed.
I asked computer consultant Martin Focazio to share some of his thoughts and research on how VOIP services make use of the 911 emergency telephone network.
Basic telephone service is, by far, the most advanced technology that people use every day. While it seems that everyone has a cell phone and voice over IP these days, the reality is that cell phones and VoIP still have quite a way to go before they can do some of the neat tricks that ordinary switched phone service can do.
The best way to see how much more cell phones and VoIP have to learn from the “old-fashioned” telephone networks is to look at how 911 calls are handled. When you dial 911 from your home phone all sorts of cool things happen.
First of all, your call is routed to a special phone switch, one that only carries emergency service. This switch is connected to a database of the physical location of the phone wires that were used to originate the call, and the dispatcher gets the address of the caller on the screen. Sometimes there’s even a map of the location, and in really fancy systems, a map and routing data is transmitted to a computer in the emergency vehicle. In many systems, the 911 operator can “seize” the line – preventing other calls from coming in, and keeping the line connected even if the caller hangs up. The 911 calls go to a Public Safety Access Point (PSAP) – the place where 911 operators and dispatchers work to assign and direct emergency service workers.
However, these Public Safety Access Points also have to deal with calls from cell phones and, more recently, VoIP calls. To say that the public safety agencies are dissatisfied with VoIP is putting it mildly.
In both cases, these neat technologies seem to be everything “ordinary” phone service is and more. But they are not quite the same in important ways.
There are two key differences that really matter. The first is that cell phones and VoIP calls are routed via ordinary telephone lines, through non-emergency phone switches. When you call 911 via a cell phone, your call is often run to an office telephone system that happens to be at the PSAP. While there’s considerable effort and progress on handling 911 calls from cell phones effectively, they are still the bane of the dispatchers day. They often have to re-key your phone number and try to guess or figure out your location, leading to exchanges like this:
Cell phone caller: “I saw an accident on the road.”
911 Operator: “What road?”
Cell phone caller: “I don’t know”
911 Operator: “Where are you now?”
Cell phone caller: “In my car”
Some primitive, slightly effective cell phone location systems are being rolled out, but GPS does not work indoors, and triangulation is – at best – an iffy proposition in urban areas.
For VoIP the situation is more complex. For most VoIP carriers, 911 calling is a for-pay option. (See for example the service offered by Vonage here, which is included at no additional charge.)
This brings the very real possibility that a VoIP customer would not be able to dial 911 at all in the event of an emergency. However, buying 911 service on a VoIP account is not actually giving customers real 911 service.
Remember the neat little tricks that a 911 operator can do with real 911 service – like get instant address data, hold a line open and so forth? 911 calls placed on most VoIP providers is routed over ordinary phone lines to an ordinary phone system at the PSAP. In some cases, the call is not even routed to a PSAP, it goes to what amounts to a call center, where an operator will try to figure out which PSAP is supposed to handle your call. For a long series of horror stories of VoIP 911 call problems see www.911dispatch.com
VoIP is, in many ways a great example of fancy features over-riding core functionality and stability. While it’s great to have 3-way calling, caller ID, call forwarding and all these neat add-ons with a VoIP service, this can’t obscure the fact that neat features on top of an incomplete base of functionality can be a – literally – fatal flaw. I’m reminded of MS-Word, which is smart enough to intercept my keystrokes and offer “help” when it detects that I’m writing a letter – but it still crashes more than I want when saving a document. Clearly, flash has outstripped function.
The point of all of this is not to say that VoIP and cell phones are a bad idea – they are not. But they are far from ready for mass deployment, despite the increasing numbers of people planning to use only cell phones and VoIP for their primary service. If a new technology comes along proposing to improve on an old one, don’t forget to look at the really hard parts of implementing the old system and realize that these parts – the deep, complex and critical aspects of the technology are some of the most important features – and ones that can’t be left out.