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Uncapped ADSL takes VOIP to cloud

Admire Moyo
By Admire Moyo, ITWeb's news editor.
Johannesburg, 14 Sept 2011

Low-cost uncapped ADSL has made it viable to host voice over Internet protocol (VOIP) infrastructure in the cloud.

Industry players say VOIP offers clear possibilities for altering the ways organisations communicate and do business. However, they agree that last-mile constraints still stifle growth in the sector.

Analyst firm Gartner notes that the cloud VOIP market is supported primarily by a fragmented base of second-tier providers. Their cumulative successes are, however, catching the attention of larger providers, which are on the cusp of offering more scalable and feature-rich solutions, says Daniel O'Connell, research director at Gartner.

A recent study conducted by In-Stat predicts that mobile VOIP usage among enterprises will grow to nearly 83 million lines by 2015.

David Meintjes, MD of Connection Telecom, notes that VOIP enables multiple communications and collaboration applications to coexist cost-effectively; such as multimedia conferencing, call centres, instant messaging, e-mail, instant office productivity, and more.

He adds that this gives businesses a managed telephony service with all the benefits of a VOIP solution, but none of the problems of owning and running it.

“With this development, it is timely to reassess the benefits of VOIP in its most recent incarnation as a cloud service,” says Meintjes.

He also notes that due to various cost-saving methods, VOIP phone charges are, on the whole, lower than cellular or fixed rates, adding that even overseas calls can be cheaper than a local fixed-line call.

However, Meintjes states that SA's VOIP market is way behind international standards, mainly because of the limited 'narrow band' nature of the local loop options, and the ability to dynamically support voice prioritisation.

Steve Briggs, CEO of ARC Telecoms, agrees, saying constraints like bandwidth limitations, high prices and insufficient infrastructure have resulted in SA lagging quite significantly behind in VOIP uptake.

Meintjes also identifies a lack of quality service planning as another factor inhibiting the local market. “This is, in particular, reference to prioritising voice above data dynamically and making sure that where multiple data routes are available, voice packets are sent on both, and the best of both routes are selected dynamically.

“This automatically puts the onsite device in 'failover' mode and directs calls over the traditional PSTN [public switched telephone network route],” he explains.

He adds that operators struggle to ensure each site has a better redundancy position than before by ascertaining that the primary route is the data route and the secondary route is the old PSTN infrastructure.

To tackle these challenges, Meintjes urges operators to have classes of service, which support real-time traffic in the network. “Such services are normally at a high cost and would mostly obviate low density route commercial benefits of doing VOIP.”

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