Can small businesses rely on VoIP?
Hampton, who runs what is essentially a one-woman web-development company, said she was glad she had her mobile phone handy when she was unable to make or receive calls from clients for 48 hours during last week’s Skype outage. She had decided to make Skype’s $40-a-year unlimited domestic calling her primary phone system to save money when she started her company.
“I always knew I needed a backup for Skype,” she said. “I was annoyed by the disruption, but since I was able to use my mobile phone, it wasn’t that big of a deal.”
Hampton’s point is well taken: while many large companies have already made the switch to IP telephones, small business may not want to cut off their traditional phone services just yet.
Indeed, many experts agree that it’s risky for small businesses to rely too heavily on services that use VoIP technology that leverages the public internet. The reason is simple. The public internet is still what is considered a “best-effort” network. Priority is not given to any type of traffic once it hits the public internet. And even though voice packets don’t take up much bandwidth, the technology is very sensitive to latency, which means that late-arriving packets could distort voice quality or cut off voice calls altogether.
While dropped calls or garbled connections may be tolerated by some consumers, business users generally have higher expectations for quality and reliability.
“The internet itself is not business class,” said Lisa Pierce, a vice president at Forrester Research. “Performance of the network is largely unpredictable. It’s like the freeway. Sometimes you can sail through with no traffic, and other times you can be stuck in a traffic jam for hours.”
Different for enterprise VoIPBy contrast, big companies deploying VoIP technology from suppliers, such as Cisco and Avaya, don’t use the public internet to transport their voice traffic. They use their own IP networks to transport calls within their campuses. And for calls travelling to other branch offices, they use leased data links rented from service providers such as Verizon or AT%26amp;T. As a result, large VoIP installations often require companies to invest millions of dollars to upgrade their local-area and wide-area network infrastructures.
There’s no question that these enterprise-class VoIP systems are too expensive for companies with fewer than 50 or 100 employees. But even the small-business offerings from Cisco and Avaya are often too pricey for many companies, especially those with fewer than 10 employees.
And yet the tiniest of companies want the features and flexibility that IP technology provides. Skype claims that nearly 30 percent of the 220 million people who have downloaded its peer-to-peer calling software client around the globe use the service for business purposes. In January, the company developed a special product called Skype for Business, which builds upon its existing calling features, such as Skype-to-Skype, Video Calling, SkypeOut, SkypeIn, conference calling, file transfer and chat.
But even though Skype is going after the “business” market, the company says it’s only addressing the very low end of the market.
