From editor@telecom-digest.org Mon Jan 12 00:26:02 2004 Received: (from ptownson@localhost) by massis.lcs.mit.edu (8.11.6p2/8.11.3) id i0C5Q2415266; Mon, 12 Jan 2004 00:26:02 -0500 (EST) Date: Mon, 12 Jan 2004 00:26:02 -0500 (EST) From: editor@telecom-digest.org Message-Id: <200401120526.i0C5Q2415266@massis.lcs.mit.edu> X-Authentication-Warning: massis.lcs.mit.edu: ptownson set sender to editor@telecom-digest.org using -f To: ptownson Approved: patsnewlist Subject: TELECOM Digest V23 #17 Status: RO TELECOM Digest Mon, 12 Jan 2004 00:26:00 EST Volume 23 : Issue 17 Inside This Special Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson Wall Street Journal Special Report on VoIP (Marcus Didius Falco) All contents here are copyrighted by Patrick Townson and the individual writers/correspondents. Articles may be used in other journals or newsgroups, provided the writer's name and the Digest are included in the fair use quote. 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Geoffrey Welsh =========================== See the bottom of this issue for subscription and archive details and the name of our lawyer; other stuff of interest. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Sun, 11 Jan 2004 22:21:49 -0500 From: Marcus Didius Falco Subject: Wall Street Journal Special Report on VoIP [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: This special issue of the Digest is devoted to VOIP phone service. It will appear in the Telecom Archives in the special reports section. My thanks to Marcus Falco and John McMullen (johnsmac group) for allowing us to use it. PAT] * Original: FROM..... John McMullen From the Wall Street Journal: http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB107350810527282200,00.html?mod=sr%2Dtechnology2004%2D1%5F2 SPECIAL REPORT: TECHNOLOGY Ready for Prime Time A new Internet-based phone technology has an un-catchy acronym: VOIP. But don't be fooled: It could make dramatic changes in the way businesses operate. By PETER GRANT Bruce Cumming hardly ever touches his office phone anymore. When he wants to call someone, Mr. Cumming simply clicks on the name in the contact list in his computer's Microsoft Outlook program. The number rings and, when someone answers, he talks to them on his speaker phone. The vice president of National Money Mart Co., a financial-services firm based in Victoria, British Columbia, also uses his computer to check voice mail, set up conference calls, and forward calls to his cellphone, home phone or any other number when he leaves the office. Recently, on a trip to National Money's Philadelphia office, Mr. Cumming plugged his laptop into the data network there and it became his office phone, with all the features that it offers back home. If someone called his number in Victoria, his laptop rang in Philadelphia. "When I called out, people would look at their caller ID and see my Victoria number," Mr. Cumming says. "They'd say, 'I thought you were in Philadelphia.'" These phone features became available earlier this year after National Money Mart installed a phone system from Mitel Networks Corp. that uses a new Internet-based phone technology known as VOIP, or voice over Internet protocol. It's not a catchy name, but get used to it all the same. At the very least, telecom experts say, most business phone systems eventually will convert to VOIP for cost savings and the wide range of new features the technology offers, like improved conference calling, and combining voice and e-mail messages on one directory, and, eventually, video phones. At most, they say, the technology could make dramatic changes in the way businesses operate, comparable to those made by the Internet and the PC. Second Chance VOIP works by transforming voice into data and then transmitting it over the Internet or some other data network in the same way text, photos and e-mail are sent. Introduced in the mid-1990s, it was one of the many new technologies that initially overpromised and underdelivered, creating great frustration for early adopters and huge losses for early investors. Some of the earliest businesses that installed VOIP were very critical of the sound quality. And even today, there are occasional kinks like echoes and shuttering sounds if data is lost in transmission. Still, enough improvements have been made to prompt businesses to take a second look at VOIP as a way of increasing efficiency and productivity and cutting costs. By the end of this year, about 20% of the new phones being shipped to U.S. businesses will use VOIP technology, according to Yankee Group, a technology consulting firm based in Boston. By 2007 that figure should exceed 50%, and eventually almost all of the new phones shipped will use VOIP, Yankee Group predicts. Almost all of the research and development being done by phone-system developers -- including Mitel, based in Kanata, Ontario, Cisco Systems Inc. of San Jose, Calif., Nortel Networks Corp. of Brampton, Ontario, and Avaya Inc. of Basking Ridge, N.J. -- is on VOIP. "The technology is ready for prime time," says Malcolm Collins, president of Nortel's enterprise networks division. VOIP can make a wide range of existing phone features easier to use, because when voice is turned into data it essentially becomes another application on the computer. For example, many conventional business phone systems give workers the ability to see a log of their calls or to program phones to ring at home or on their cellphones. But activating these features means pushing a bunch of buttons on the telephone. With VOIP, setting them up just takes a couple of clicks of the mouse. Setting up a conference call with standard phones often requires the assistance of an operator. With VOIP, it involves a simple click-and-drag operation on the computer screen, putting a cursor on the names of the conferees. As people join and exit the call, their names are added or subtracted on the screen. Features also can be combined with other data applications. For instance, voice mail and e-mail can be combined in a single directory. "It makes it easy for a lawyer who's been at a deposition all day and has to travel out of town," says Bill Costello, technology chief at Banner & Witcoff. "They can download their master mailbox to their laptop and head for the airport." The Washington-based law firm installed an Avaya VOIP system a year ago. Then there are features that weren't possible on conventional phone systems that allow for customization. Take the police department of Bend, Ore., which installed a Cisco VOIP system starting two years ago. Police investigators wanted to verify that a suspect they were seeking was at a particular phone number in California. Technicians were able to set up a call so that it wouldn't be identified on the other end as coming from the police department, says Steve Meyers, the city's information technology director. Instead, it showed the call coming from a phony name and number. The suspect "picked up the phone and they talked to him briefly," says Mr. Meyers. "They knew where he was." Another plus for VOIP is its portability. VOIP phones with a particular phone number can be taken anywhere, connected to a broadband connection and still receive calls at the same number. That means employees can easily and inexpensively move desks or work from home or a hotel and still get all the calls directed at their work phone numbers. They keep all the features that their work phones have, like four-digit calling to other extensions. It's a cost-conscious manager's dream, because moving employees from one location to another can be done without a technician. In October, when Vegas.com, a business that runs one of the biggest Las Vegas Web sites, moved its operations to a larger building in a suburban office park, employees lost very little time, thanks to the VOIP phone system the company purchased from Nortel. "We did it in groups of four," says Howard Lefkowitz, president of Vegas.com, a unit of Greenspun Media Group, Henderson, Nev. "Employees unplugged their phones, carried them across the street and they worked." There are also savings on long-distance bills, given that VOIP calls between offices cost the same as sending e-mail. The long-distance bill of Banner & Witcoff dropped so much that the law firm received a call from a long-distance representative at AT&T Corp. after it installed its VOIP system. "They were concerned that we switched carriers," says Mr. Costello. Always Within Reach VOIP phone systems are proving especially useful in businesses that rely heavily on roving employees, like a hotel or warehouse. Using cordless VOIP phones, workers can stay in touch with managers as well as enter data in the business's computer system. A maid in a hotel, for instance, can use her phone to let the front desk know when a room is cleaned or when she's running out of shampoo and conditioner bottles. The nurses at Erlanger Health System, which operates a medical center in Chattanooga, Tenn., have been responding to patient calls faster since the hospital installed a VOIP system a year ago, says John Haltom, the center's network manager. They now make their rounds with a cart that contains a laptop with an attached phone. They use the laptop to enter patient reports. A nurse doesn't have to go back to his or her station to see that a patient has been ringing the buzzer for 15 minutes, because the calls go immediately to the phone. "It takes the ball and chain off them," Mr. Haltom says. VOIP also is making big changes in call centers, in some cases enabling companies to replace big centralized facilities with virtual operations. For instance, all of JetBlue Airways' reservations agents work from home using VOIP phones hooked into high-speed Internet connections. Call centers also have begun to add features so agents can go from instant messaging to e-mail to phone communication quickly. Some businesses have set up systems to recognize certain incoming numbers and give preferred customers special treatment. Eventually, these new VOIP features in call centers may reduce the numerous annoyances consumers often experience when calling them, like having to give an agent account numbers and personal information after having already punched them into the phone. Ravi Sethi, president of Avaya, says the company already has installed some of these new applications in its own call center. "The number of abandoned calls went down," he says. "People were happier." VOIP will trigger even bigger changes to the workplace in the future, telecom experts predict. More employers will follow JetBlue's lead and allow employees to work from home. The use of branch offices will likely become more popular, since VOIP greatly reduces the cost of interoffice phone calls. And more companies will begin the practice of "hoteling," cutting space costs by assigning desks to employees who travel a lot on a short-term basis. "You come into the office, log into any phone and it takes on the appearance of your own phone," says Robert Filby, a manager of the consulting firm Cap Gemini Ernst & Young, which acquired a VOIP system from Cisco. "The [VOIP] technology lends itself to that." Businesses also can expect a wide range of new features. Major telecom companies and small start-ups are busy developing new software that will incorporate video phones, voice recognition, wireless technology and other applications into VOIP systems. "It's just like the Internet itself," says Steve Dimmit, a marketing vice president with SBC Communications Inc., which has begun offering VOIP systems to its business customers. "People are going to come up with applications we haven't thought of before." -- Mr. Grant is a staff reporter in The Wall Street Journal's New York bureau. Write to Peter Grant at peter.grant@wsj.com --------------------------------------------------------------- http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB107350780635649000,00.html?mod=article-outset-box Technical Adviser By LEE GOMES Taking Net Calls for a Test Ride Psst. Wanna make phone calls cheap and even free? Then remember these four letters: VOIP. Voice over Internet protocol, or VOIP, is the latest rumble in the continuing Internet earthquake. By using the Internet to transmit digitized telephone signals, VOIP is making possible all manner of low- or even no-cost alternatives to traditional phone service, often with just-as-good quality. This is a user report on two of these offerings. The executive summary: Try them both, since you can do so for free. The first is from Vonage Holdings Corp., which calls itself "the broadband phone company." At the prices this Edison, N.J., operation is offering local and long-distance telephone service, it's little wonder why regular phone companies are worried about VOIP. Vonage's rates are low. Its most expensive regular plan is $35 a month, which allows you to make unlimited calls in the U.S. and Canada at no additional cost, and to call much of the rest of the world for five cents a minute. And that's all you pay, since Vonage's services are currently untaxed. You can use Vonage if you have any sort of broadband Internet connection, either a cable modem or DSL. Vonage ships you an adapter that is the size of a paperback, which connects via a cable to your broadband modem. Then, you plug any standard telephone into a phone jack in the back of the Vonage adapter. Your phone will now act like it's plugged into the regular phone network, letting you make and receive calls to and from any other phone. My Vonage unit worked just like it was supposed to, right out of the box; I got a dial tone the first time I picked up the headset. The one difference is that you need to dial 1 and then the area code all the time, even when making local calls. How good is the voice quality? It's going to depend on the quality of your local broadband link. Since I have a great DSL connection, my Vonage phone sounded essentially the same as my regular telephone. Others aren't going to have the same experience. When chatting with Chip Cummins, a Vonage customer in Kingwood, Texas -- and a monster VOIP phone buff -- his words would cut out in mid-sentence so often that we had to switch over to regular phones. Since Internet-service providers and broadband connections vary so greatly, it's hard to know in advance what your experience will be like. The good news here is that Vonage gives you a free two-week trial period. And Vonage is worth checking out for reasons other than the low prices. For instance, you can call a local number to check your voice-mail messages or you can check them online, and can even have them e-mailed to you as sound file attachments. My favorite Vonage trick: When traveling to a place that also has a broadband connection, anywhere in the world, take your Vonage adapter with you. A phone plugged into it will act just like your home phone, sending and receiving calls at your regular home number, for no extra charge. When you sign up for Vonage, you can either transfer your current telephone number to your Vonage set or the company can give you a new one. While some people may want to go all-Vonage right away, I would recommend the latter course, at least initially, so you can be assured you are comfortable with the voice quality. Later, if you want, you can transfer your current landline number, severing ties to your telephony past. A very different approach to VOIP is Skype, a free and very popular program, from a group of programmers in Denmark, that you download onto your PC. You hook up a PC-style headphone (with separate plug for the earpieces and microphone) to the sound card on your PC. Then, you can talk for free with anyone else in the world who also is running Skype and sitting, similarly equipped, in front of his or her PC. When Skype works, it's great. But the software is very hit and miss, both in terms of making connections and in the quality of the link once it's there. Considering the price tag, though, it's hard to complain. And the Skype folks promise continual improvements. (The programmers plan to offer a professional version of Skype to companies for a fee.) Whatever its problems, Skype already is making one valuable contribution to the world of telephony: When Skype is working right, the sound quality is awesome -- like rich CD audio compared with the tinny AM radio of regular phone calls. The problem with regular phones is part hardware -- neither the microphones nor speakers used in phones are anything remotely resembling audiophile quality -- and part software, in that the standards and specifications used to transmit voice signals don't allow for much quality to begin with. There probably isn't a lot that can be done with existing landline standards, since the industry is so mature. But with any luck, engineers in the much newer worlds of both mobile and VOIP telephone service will pay attention to voice quality as they introduce new generations of service. Skype sounds as good as it does, in part, because the headphones made for PCs are vastly better than the sort used in most telephones, either standard or mobile. That got me wondering about sound quality on existing house phones; I noticed a dramatic difference, even on the same line, between my Panasonic cordless handset (poor) and the AT&T model (much better). Which are the best phones to use for sound quality? Readers are welcome to send in recommendations, which will be passed along in a future column. In that spirit, a recent column about browser shortcuts (Technical Adviser, Oct. 20) omitted, due to authorial ignorance, one of the most useful shortcuts of all. With recent versions of Internet Explorer, if you simply type in the address bar the name of the site you want to go to, such as "Yahoo," and then, while holding down the "Control" key, press "Enter," Explorer will automatically fill in everything else, including the "http://www" beforehand and the ".com" afterward. Try it with "Vonage" or "Skype." Your friends will say, "Cool, dude!" And it is. Write to Lee Gomes at lee.gomes@wsj.com Copyright 2004 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. *** FAIR USE NOTICE. This message contains copyrighted material whose use has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. The 'johnmacsgroup' Internet discussion group is making it available without profit to group members who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information in their efforts to advance the understanding of literary, educational, political, and economic issues, for non-profit research and educational purposes only. I believe that this constitutes a 'fair use' of the copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Law. If you wish to use this copyrighted material for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use,' you must obtain permission from the copyright owner, in this instance, Dow-Jones and Wall Street Journal. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml "When you come to the fork in the road, take it" - L.P. Berra "Always make new mistakes" -- Esther Dyson "Be precise in the use of words and expect precision from others" - Pierre Abelard "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" -- Arthur C. Clarke "You Gotta Believe" - Frank "Tug" McGraw (1944 - 2004 RIP) John F. McMullen http://www.westnet.com/~observer [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: My thanks once again to Marcus and the johnsmac group for permission to publish this. For those new readers who do not know, *I* have e-coupons available for Vonage. If you click on the link I will send you on request, you will get one month of free service, just for test driving Vonage. Actually you get the second month free. No contracts or other obligations. To get an e-coupon for a month of free Vonage service, just send a note marked 'not for publication' to me and request it. ptownson@telecom-digest.org You'll be helping me and the Digest. Thanks! PAT] ------------------------------ TELECOM Digest is an electronic journal devoted mostly but not exclusively to telecommunications topics. It is circulated anywhere there is email, in addition to various telecom forums on a variety of networks such as Compuserve and America On Line, Yahoo Groups, and other forums. It is also gatewayed to Usenet where it appears as the moderated newsgroup 'comp.dcom.telecom'. TELECOM Digest is a not-for-profit, mostly non-commercial educational service offered to the Internet by Patrick Townson. All the contents of the Digest are compilation-copyrighted. You may reprint articles in some other media on an occasional basis, but please attribute my work and that of the original author. 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