Is your business ready for VoIP?

That's quite a revelation. Not only do you need a phone system server, VoIP phones and network service hardware (switches and routers) that tick the boxes in supporting all the right protocols and standards, you also need a relationship with a provider of connectivity that clearly understands the needs of VoIP traffic. A company that won't suddenly cut you off ffrom your chosen SIP portal because it happens to have been playing with traffic shaping and monthly data caps, somewhere deep in its switching centre's rack.

Suddenly, the pitches from bigger VoIP roll-outs, which come with their own 2Mbits/sec SDSL pipeline alongside whatever connection you may currently be using, start to look a lot more sensible.

Clear bias towards VoIP provision

We suggest you use ISPs with a clear bias towards VoIP provision, including Zen Internet, inner-London specialists Spitfire and SME-targeted national provider Gradwell.

VoIP systems consist of a raft of custom hardware, linked together by traditional networking kit. Then there are external connections, such as to the normal phone service network, or to an ISP that acts as a SIP telephony proxy.

The smaller business providers say they're happy to reuse kit, connections and relationships you already have, but the bigger guys deliver their own DSL lines, often hooked up to specialist ISPs. Here, deployments will sometimes link up the data and voice LANs via a single patch lead in the data cabinet, a bit like the two hemispheres of the brain.

Your small-business LAN can be dropping and resending most of the packets it creates, and if your usage is low volume, you could never know; until, that is, you try to run an application that treats the LAN as an environment where a dropped packet is grounds for a massive enquiry, flashing red lights and sulking connections.

Application

VoIP implementations are just such an application. By using various network traffic types and signalling methods and mixing them up to handle call initialisation, audio shipment, status broadcasts and bandwidth competition, each with a different mechanism, the VoIP product architects have changed the basic requirements for your network.

This isn't restricted to buying VoIP-capable central switches to run all those VoIP phones. The knock-on effects stretch to your choice of internet supplier, the number of connections you have, and whether you can mix your VoIP and web-surfing connections freely on a single connection.

It isn't a simple sideline to the main business of shared drive letters, email and databases. It's an architecture refresh from the ground up, and the first place to look isn't at the backbone or the wiring: it's at your router and your ISP.