;VOIP Connects Data and Voice

Your business operates multiple locations either in the same state,province or country around the globe. Typically, I’ll say typically as in the past, the communications between these locations is either a very high cost and as such they were limited to larger organization or they were very poor connections until VOIP.

Now when we think about connecting offices or when most people think about connecting office they think about connecting the computing resources. So the computer systems, perhaps the email systems and the telephone systems inter-operating usually are not factored into this discussion, usually, however recently with the advent of Voice over Internet Protocol or VoIP, telephone systems, inter-office communications can and does today mean both telephone and computing.

Now when you have multiple locations you can connect the computer systems together using what’s called the wide area network and for that wide area network connection you can use the internet using what’s called the Virtual Private Network – Firewalls and Routers that have VPN technology Virtual Private Network what that means is that you use a public network like the internet and you create a connection often referred to as a tunnel. The reason we call it a tunnel is because this connection has an encryption wrapped around if you will.

So that the data that you’re transmitting across this public infrastructure, the internet is encrypted to make it private and this is why we call these Virtual Private Network. Now VPN technology works effectively and works well depending on the type of traffic and information that your transmitting across it and the sensitivity to delay also in the VOIP Voice over IP technology no one has latency, how slow the connection or the transmission can be.

Now in voice technology if we’re transmitting your voice from one location to another, we have things that we need to deal with called echo. That’s like if you yell into a large auditorium or out into a canyon you will hear your voice reflecting back to you an echo means that there is a delay in the reflection of the sound waves, so that the voice comes back to you at a later period of time.

With VOIP Voice over IP technology, if we are getting echo it means that we have a very slow connection. If you think back, if you’ve ever spoken over a satellite connection maybe 15 or 20 years ago or more recently if you’ve spoken to  people using satellite phones, however that technology is much better today, is that you can actually hear your voice coming back to you before you here the response of the person. It becomes much more a one-way conversation. You speak, you stop and you wait for the other person to reply. Now what does all this have to do with multiple offices. Well an expensive way of interconnecting offices is to use dedicated or leased services, leased line services between your office locations.

Now if you hadn’t to be in a metropolitan city where they have Metropolitan Area Network MAN services that are cost effective, you can actually deploy an interoffice Wide Area Network called a Metropolitan Area Network, that is less costly because you are piggy backing onto the infrastructure that’s already in place and typically say like a large city like Toronto or New York you have a large amount of fiber optics to carry the signals and many buildings are what they called on Net, meaning that the fiber is already running to that building or very close to the public access to that building, so that you can have access to the network connections.

Now if we join our networks together so that our systems can talk together, perhaps we have a centralized Microsoft Exchange Server where the remote offices are using Outlook Clients or perhaps we put in a Citrix or a Microsoft Terminal Server into our main office, we keep all our servers in our central office and our remote clients use Remote Desktop and all their application live in the terminal server, that works in some and some instances it doesn’t. But the advantage to an organization using a terminal services solution is that the intelligence and the maintenance to the application resides on a centralized server, where as in a desktop environment or a work station environment the application intelligence lies on the discrete or individual computer work stations. Therefore, it requires more support and maintenance.

Now there’s advantages and disadvantages to both. We’re not going to cover that in this discussion because that’s not the purpose of this. So multiple office locations, so if you have telephone systems in each of your office locations what you’re going to want is to create a dialing plan or an extension number system that’s going to allow you to have three or four or five digit dialing between your offices.

VOIP for Users-Transparency

Traditionally people would pick-up the phone and dial the ten digit or seven digit PSTN (Public Switched Telephone Network) number to access the other office and  then either speak to the reception to get to the person they wish to speak to or go through the automated attendant and dial the extension. What we want to do is we want to take out the inter-connection, the need to touch the public infrastructure and spend money on those telephone lines because you can think about this.

If we have to call from office to office, we need one telephone line out of the office we’re calling from and one telephone line into the office we’re calling to, which means we have reduced the number of lines that are available for our clients to speak to us at both of those locations.

If we were able to use able to use a VOIP or Voice over IP connection between these to locations we would still have those telephone lines to the outside world available for our clients, our customers to call us and we would have those lines available to call our customers from. So we really want to look for a phone system that will allow us to do this, have the flexibility so that the offices can communicate to each other through a simple extension plan and also called a dialing plan and ideally the phone systems at each location can function independently so that if there was ever a disruption of service between the locations, then each office can continue to function with their own voice mail automated attendant and telephone supported fully.

So that business continues as usual and then when the system and the services are back up, it’s the ability for these offices to communicate by VOIP fully using your data network between offices.

Now when we’re going to use the data network between offices, we would consider, but we should be putting in quality of service also know as QOS. What this is going to do for us is it’s going to say hey if this is a VOIP call or a telephone call, we’re going to give this information that’s being transmitted in this telephone call the highest level of service or highest level of quality or Hi-Fi level of priority on the network when we transmit between location A and location B, because a data packet for your Microsoft Exchange Server or your line of business application can be delayed a few hundred  milliseconds and there would be no effect on to the quality of that data transmission. However if you delay a voice packet, you’re going to start getting drop outs and calls dead air or you’re going to end up with pops and click or echo on the line.

So quality of service at both ends and if we’re using a public network infrastructure to connect our offices, want to control all traffic in an out of that pipe, so that we can make certain that at least what we call our last mile, our first connection into our internet service provider is going to give us the optimal service.

Now here are some caveats to think about public infrastructure with cable systems, you’re using a shared network, meaning that you and your neighbors who are using the cable network are all sharing a common network cable. So therefore your quality of service may be much lower, however the cable companies have invested a lot of money into preparing their cable systems for the transmission of voice so that they can deploy their own  VOIP Voice over IP phone systems and VOIP telephones for home usage. So the other caveat is that Digital Subscriber Lines, DSL or ADSL are susceptible to the quality of the copper.

If you’re depending on the distance, you are from the central office, that is  where the telephone company’s main phone connections are, so they interconnect you to all of the other telephones in the world, where that office is and the age of the copper in the line. So if you’re in an area that’s primarily residential, in a lot of cities the phone cable is run in the ground itself, it’s not run through conduits or prepared in the way that will protect the cable so that environmentally the cables can be effected by weather, if the cable is 20 or 30 years old the shielding on these cables become brittle and crack and then they become susceptible to electrical interference induced or created by water, so if it’s raining heavily and the phone rings you would drop your internet connection, so a lot of people will see dropped interconnections typically when it’s a wet or rainy season.

A lot of this is starting to go away as the internet companies, the telephone companies are going out and they’re bringing the services closer and closer to your office and residence. So just to understand there are some caveats using public internet with the quality of service that you’re going to use. Now there are providers out there who will allow you to use multiple internet connections and transmit your data over those multiple networks, so that you could have a cable connection from your cable company and a DSL connection from your telephone company and perhaps you could have a dedicated T1 connection and then you could share your internet across all three of those and manage and control your bandwidth so that you’re transmitting the information from you network out and back so that it’s transparent to you as a service user, then you get the highest level of quality.

VOIP -Experience the Codefusion Advantage

So connecting multiple offices together is not a trivial undertaking, however to an experienced company like Codefusion Communications, where we’ve been doing this for over 15 years, we have a number of best practices to allow us to draw on our experience to know the best methods for implementing your multi-location communication solution and this is going to encompass, your telephone systems, your computer networks and the security that’s required to ensure that your systems are safe, secure and stable.

Now if you’re interested in perhaps reviewing the requirements for your multi-office, multi-location network solution, then we would be happy to speak to you about VOIP. Please visit us at www.codefusion.com or give us a telephone call at 416-335-9390. Look forward to speaking with you soon about VOIP.