Hosted services represent the cutting edge of VoIP: The concept is of communication, particularly business communication, as a pure service with little or no hardware, except phones, at the customer premises.
But, in part because they are that cutting edge, hosted VoIP
services have sometimes experienced challenges with reliability. Partly in response to those challenges, there is a clear trend among hosted providers to strengthen their services with new efforts to improve reliability.
To explore this trend, we surveyed and interviewed a wide range of industry executives working on the front lines as service providers, industry analysts and integrators.
“I do see many hosted service providers adding new functions in management and system integration,” says Scott Wharton, former vice president of marketing for BroadSoft (News - Alert). “Look at it from what end users want. How would a small business think about these things? A lot don’t want to do this and can’t be bothered.”
He adds, “And the service provider has to do it. Otherwise they will have more cost on the back end, when customers call and complain because of things they did wrong or didn’t diagnose. In addition, [management and system integration] are part of the value proposition that service providers can offer.”
John Ciccone, manager for consulting firm BearingPoint, observes, “The providers who are concerned about quality of service (the mid-priced providers and above) understand that there's a need to integrate, monitor and manage the customer's service. All the better to offer some value-add services to recoup some of the costs associated with ensuring a quality offering.”
Getting the Hook-Up
Most agree the first priority is taking steps to make the last mile to the customer perform as well as possible. Joe Fuccillo, President & CTO, Nectar (News - Alert) Services, a provider of both managed PBXs and hosted VoIP based on Avaya PBX technology, says, “Hosted systems are by nature network centric, and reliance on the IP network is critical. As we offer service in a particular geography, we often find our ability to deliver IP broadband is spotty. It goes from really good to OK to unreliable. We felt that big part of our solution had to be local survivability, so the system could break apart from our headend and still deliver 100 percent feature survivability. That is why we chose Avaya.”
Nectar, a unit of Juma Technology (News - Alert) has a heritage as a PBX system integrator and a great deal of experience installing and maintaining the Avaya platform
“We use private point-to-point T1s with compression that gives an 80 kbps data rate allowing 70 simultaneous calls,” says Paul Gilbert, account manager, CallTower, which provides hosted-and-managed PBX (News - Alert) services using Cisco Systems Inc. CallManagers.
J Oquendo, engineer, Prescient Worldwide, which provides hosted managed PBXs, says, “We provide most of the T1s, T3s and other connections associated with the managed PBXs. Most customers who dive into VoIP without understanding it tend to forget that, without their network, there is no VoIP, period.” Oquendo says his company makes doubly sure the “pipe” is always on, using “two connections to two different providers. If one provider drops, your conversation keeps going. Top that, Vonage.”
“If you have Internet downtime or an unreliable connection, then hosted is definitely not for you,” says Jason Erickson, infrastructure engineer for Heartland Technology Solutions, a fast-growing network integrator serving the Midwest from Iowa through Oklahoma. “If you are a small company and have a good connection with low latency, and very little jitter, it may be ideal for you.”
Under the Microscope
Another strategy is adding or beefing up ongoing monitoring and management, often making the same tools used by service provider staff available to customers.
Fuccillo says Nectar “took all the information we have and found a way to present it to the end customer in a way that makes sense to them. For a call center, Fidelis (the company’s monitoring application) has an on-screen dashboard ... where they can see all the critical services and processes that help them.”
The dashboard is oriented to services as well as pieces of equipment. For a health center, for example, being able to record calls is critical, Fuccillo says. “There are 15-20 components that have to work together to record a phone call across multiple locations in an IP system. It has to be redundant, so you can lose a component and still record calls.” The monitoring system has the intelligence to anticipate problems and to pinpoint which users might be affected. “The managed service provider can see the problem really quickly and not wait until someone sees an impact on their business,” Fuccillo says.
CallTower bases its “hosted” service on the Cisco CallManager, using its tools to manage and monitor systems. “We have five 9s“ says Gilbert. “We also do all our own installations, which use a strict protocol to ensure quality.”
Aaron Rosenthal, senior account executive, Special Applied Intelligence, a provider of managed IT, including installing and managing IP PBXs, has a more sanguine view. “System integration and network monitoring, in my opinion, are more marketing buzz words designed to attract larger businesses.” However, he adds, “One area where hosted VoIP could be attractive to a larger business is in the support and SLA-backed response times. A larger business, and even smaller businesses, want to have the ability to make administrative changes on a regular basis. Some hosted VoIP providers offer web interfaces for administration, while others simply request that you submit changes via email or by a phone call.”
Larger business customers are the ones with the need for extensive access to monitoring, says Rosenthal. “Few small business of 20 seats ever need network monitoring and system integration, which is more of a luxury for small businesses than a necessity.”
Still some service providers and integrators are adding the monitoring and management for smaller customers. Rick Beaupre, a senior sales engineer, for ACS Services, and provider of managed IT services, including VoIP, based in the Boston area, says providers of smaller hosted or hybrid systems, such as Thinking Phone Networks or Whaleback Systems treat each setup with a personal touch so that no variance is overlooked. We even have customers on DSL with the above solutions with no voice issues. We add managed services to our offering to enhance the end user’s experience.”
After deploying, configuring and revamping “countless” VoIP PBXs, Oquendo claims his company’s managed PBX farm–“multiple machines with multiple users, including a "home-based" Vonage-like system” -operates “without incidences.”
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Charlotte Wolter (News - Alert) is a TMCnet contributing editor. Wolter has been a technology journalist and analyst for 20 years, managing publications, writing articles and reports, and providing consultation about market trends. To view her columnist page, click here.
Private Branch Exchange (PBX) | X |
| Originally, telephone features were provided by telephone central office switching systems, often called CENTREX.�PBX systems emerged as customers wanted to have more calling features and control over...more |
Voice over IP (VoIP) | X |
| A real-time communications system that converts voice into digital packets containing media and signaling data that travel over networks using Internet Protocol....more |
Internet Protocol (IP) | X |
| IP stands for Internet Protocol, a data-networking protocol developed throughout the 1980s. It is the established standard protocol for transmitting and receiving data
in packets over the Internet. I...more |
Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) | X |
| Frequency Division Multiplexing is used in wireline systems such as CATV-Community Antenna TeleVision and DSL-Digital Subscriber Line systems. This form of FDM is also called Broadband Multiplexing o...more |
Jitter | X |
| Jitter in voice or video is the result of delay due to the inherent "best efforts" basis (or no QoS) in IP networks. Oversubscription is the primary cause. Oversubscription is generally defined as the...more |
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