Limits of Traditional Telephony System over VoIP

In this post I am going to discuss about some limits of traditional Telephone (PSTN) system comparing with VoIP system. The PSTN's capabilities are largely proportional to its physical connections, because every call must have a circuit, or loop, set up at the beginning of the call and torn down at the end. The PSTN telephone system can does this calling easily but there are some limitations associated with its circuit-switched nature. The whole system took lots of year to complete. And many PSTN companies are still working on it to make this service more popular to users. Still some parts of this PSTN does not support Caller ID.

Capacity limits is another disadvantage of this kind of telephone system. The reliability of a call’s sound is reproduction is limited to the available Bandwidth between the recipient and caller. And the number of calls between two or more offices depends on the availability of Physical Circuits that are exists between them.

Another main problem of traditional telephone system is the cost. The telephone companies and phone equipments manufacturers are hardly trying to reduce the call cost and capacity limitations. PBX feature like LCR – Least Cost Routing and High-density digital circuits such as T1, T3 has brought the cost of high density telephony down. Recently long distance calling rate is going to be cheaper and the cost of on-premises PBX hardware and feature – rich business telephone has dropped over time.

Since the telephone system features were considered as a competitive advantage in personal and business use, and users began searching for a low cost telephone system. But the question was how ?

Enterprise telephony innovators began looking on the Internet for the answer how to minimize the cost. Because of core differences in engineering philosophy and many years of additional discourse on the matter, the Internet is superior in many ways to traditional voice networks.

Communication Protocol on the internet are in a constant state of improvement. So using this technology excellent voice can be generated using bandwidth which will be more efficient. On the internet the capacity of calls can handle through software instead of Hardware like PSTN, PBX etc. IP Networks grow in capacity as software improves. The software on the IP telephony system use low cost PCs, its another advantage. Hardware up gradation is not too much expensive. Upgrading software can increase the capacity and it is easier to scale the capacity on IP networks rather than circuit based telephone system.

While the PSTN is quite reliable, it is far less disaster-proof than IP networks. The Internet Protocol permits redundancy and fail over capabilities that are inexpensive and relatively easy to implement and maintain. Geographic diversity, a technique used on data networks to circumvent local connectivity interruptions, is very easy for the enterprise to achieve with the Internet, but more difficult on the PSTN. For example, you can connect to two Internet service providers and use the same set of IP addresses with both, thanks to the BGP standard, but it's nearly impossible to use the same set of phone numbers with two telephone companies. Border Gateway Protocol, RFC 1105.

Because most modern enterprise networks use the same protocols as the Internet, it was only a matter of time before the advantages of those protocols began appealing to designers of voice networks. The result of that appeal is an immense technology family called Voice over Internet Protocol, or VoIP.

VoIP is loosely defined as using the TCP/IP Protocol suite to transmit voice conversations, but it is really much more than voice conversation. It can be used to replace traditional telephony in the enterprise or in the home or merely to add some extra features to a traditional telephony system. VoIP can also solve connectivity challenges, like linking traditional PBXs at remote sites together, linking private telephone extensions at a single site together like a PBX, or simply aggregating calls among a few analog phones like a key system.

VoIP can be used to facilitate voice communications on many different application substrates, too. It can provide on-demand voice-calling capabilities to users of a customer service web page and allow people to use their personal computers as fully featured business telephones. It can play a role in bridging cell phone and landline systems, too.

VoIP technologies can even run the entire enterprise voice telephone network. The VoIP technology family can even facilitate video streaming, conferencing, whiteboard applications, and instant text messaging, challenging the traditional distinction between data and voice networks.

Of course, VoIP needs a TCP/IP network in order to operate. Until recently, TCP/IP networks were less abundant than were connections to the PSTN. And even when TCP/IP began to rise in popularity, many private networks still weren't connected to the Internet, so the PSTN was always more appealing than the Internet for voice applications. But today, all of that has changed. There are an estimated 36 million permanent, private TCP/IP networks in the United States, and about 30 million of them are linked via high-speed connections to the Internet

When data networks like the Internet are used to carry real-time media traffic, they are called converged networks. The process of implementing real-time media applications, such as IP telephony, on a data network is called convergence. Networks (such as the Internet and software-based call management). VoIP's biggest advantages over traditional telephony are scalability and infrastructural cost savings, though easier integration between telephony and computer applications is a big attraction, too.

Enterprise implementers considering VoIP are comparing scalability against that of traditional PBX equipment and discovering that VoIP's basis in software gives it a big advantage. While a small PBX built for 100 telephones is quite costly to scale up to 500 phones, for example, a VoIP call-management solution can usually scale up just as servers and network hardware doand 500 phones is not a particularly tall order for even a moderately equipped VoIP setup.

Reasons to Choose Voice over IP

• VoIP devices are easier and cheaper to maintain because they leverage the cor-porate data network rather than their own single-purpose voice-only network.

• VoIP increases the value of the Internet by using it for voice communications.

• Integrating telephony with computer applications is much easier with VoIP than with traditional voice systems, because in VoIP settings, call management tends to be more open, standardized, and software-driven.

• VoIP can scale more cheaply than traditional voice systems because it often uses off-the-shelf, frequently updated PC hardware.

• It allows for more centralized administrative control than a traditional PBX.

• Managing a VoIP network is accomplished using the same network that carries the voice information itself, unlike the PSTN with its SS7 protocol.

• Survivability against disasters and network outages is easier to achieve with TCP/IP than with traditional voice systems, due to its basis in software and TCP/IP's remarkable resilience measures and routing protocols.

• Much of your existing phone equipment can interface with VoIP systems using analog terminal adapters, or ATAs.

• VoIP's acronym is fun to say ("voyp").

Cost savings are attracting businesses to VoIP. Since VoIP runs over a data network, it has the same facilities requirements as a data network. Whereas traditional telephony devices such as a PBX normally require separate local area wiring for analog and digitial phone connections, this wiring usually can't be used for local area data networking because it doesn't provide ample resistance to interference and attenuation. With VoIP, the same wiring is used for both data and voice, since the voice is carried within the data network.

The cost of future expansion is almost always less expensive with VoIP than with traditional telephony. Because it can be centrally administered more easily than traditional systems, VoIP allows system expansion, ongoing security enforcement, and back-office call accounting to be cheaper over time.

Other related posts:

VoIP Basics
PSTN, Voice and Data 
Global VoIP Provider

PSTN, Voice and data

Voice and Data:

Telephony is the communication of spoken information between two or more participants or devices, by means of carried signals over wires or wireless. Ever since Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone circuit and first envisioned the public telephone system (PSTN). In today world Consumers and businesses have relied on telephony as a clip of interaction.

The PSTN

In the year 2004, there were almost 200 million traditional, land phone lines in the United States of America. This network connects all these phones together wraps around the world. The main function of the PSTN (Public Switched Telephone Network) is to reliably facilitate telephone conversations at any time of day. The PSTN combines Digital, Analog and electro-mechanical data links that strive to make sure that every time you pick up your phone receiver, you hear a dial-tone, and every time you can make call directly to your friend and family or anyone across the globe whenever you need.

Some key features of PSTN, Voice, PBX and Data

• The PSTN was developed as a result of premature telephony systems' efforts at building meshed and switched networks.

• SS7 is the switch-to-switch signaling network using to connect and bill calls placed across the PSTN.

• POTS (plain old telephone service), is the basic single-line analog voice service from a phone company.

• Key systems and PBXs provide businesses a method of communicating to others for their business or any other purpose at a lower cost than dealing only with PSTN-provided services.

• Lines and trunks are links between telephony devices. A line is a link from a switch to a phone. A trunk is a link from a switch to a switch.

• Voice over IP encompasses a large family of interface technologies, protocols, and standards that enable real-time media applications using IP networks.

• Traditional telephony isn't scalable like VoIP because it isn't software-driven like VoIP. Its ratio of calling capacity to network infrastructure is fixed, while VoIP's has lots of room for optimization.

• VoIP is suitable for deployment in homes and businesses, and, thanks to broadband and deregulation, is earning a reputation as a more practical way of delivering telephony services.

With the help of Internet technologies and high-speed data connectivity in the enterprise, a new family of telephony technologies has begun called VoIP. Voice over Internet Protocol, or VoIP, has significant appeal for the enterprise, for service providers, and for end users, because it allows the Internet and commonplace data networks, like those at offices, factories, and campuses, to become carriers for voice calls, video conferencing, and other real-time media applications.

VoIP-savvy organizations are discovering that they can apply the paradigm of distributed, software-based networking to voice applications and enable a new generation of telecommunications features, cost-savings, and productivity enhancements.

VoIP can replace business telephone systems, or it can add value to existing traditional telephony devices. For instance, long-distance connectivity between two offices with traditional telephone systems can often be accomplished with a lower cost per call when VoIP is employed.

VoIP network protocols can serve as a platform for other communication media like text messaging and video conferencing. In fact, you've probably used a flavor of VoIP for such an application by now; they've been popular as an Internet pastime for several years. Yahoo! offers a "party line"-style service that features Voice over IP chat rooms. Apple's iChat and Microsoft's NetMeeting, Google's gtalk applications also offer text, voice, and video calling delivered through VoIP protocols.

Dozens of standards define how Voice over IP works, but little documentation exists on best practices for implementing and maintaining the technology in the enterprise. There's not much introductory instruction for VoIP, so beginners may have a hard time taking their first steps with it. There have been several high-profile implementation failures among large enterprise adopters, and this may be why IP telephony has such an intimidating reputation.

Nonetheless, if it's done right, Voice over IP can transform the cost model of telecommunications by combining the overhead of voice and data expertise and infrastructure. It can also enhance productivity for end users by introducing new features and for telecommunication administrators by centralizing management functions. Voice over IP can decrease the expense of future computer-telephony integration projects, while making it easier to link voice systems with web servers and database applications.

The book Switching to VoIP by Theodore Wallingford will give you practical guidance on switching to Voice over IP from traditional telephony systems. It gives a brief introduction to traditional telecom systems, and correlates their features and fundamentals to those of IP telephony systems, while showing ways of integrating traditional telephony assets into an IP-based voice network. It will describe the standards involved, so you can make educated choices among the large selection of components and vendors. It will also help you conquer some of the most problematic issues that people face when building telephony systems with Voice over IP.

Plain Old Telephone Service

When you pick up a traditional telephone, like the one in your house, the dial-tone you hear is a signal transmitted over the simplest kind of voice circuit: an analog phone line, also called a POTS (plain old telephone service) line. The line is a simple electrical loop. On the other end of the line is the telephone company's switch, or exchange. It is this switch that gives your phone its electrical power, sends the sound signals emitted by its audio transducer, and knows how to handle the numbers you dial on its keypad.

The switch also knows how to provide POTS calling features like call-waiting, a service that allows your call in progress to be placed on hold while you answer another caller who is trying to call your linewhen you tap the receiver's hook, the switch recognizes the electromagnetic signal you created (called a flash), connects your phone line to the call that's waiting on another line on the switch, and places your first caller on hold. Later, when you send the flash signal again, the first caller is re-connected with your line and you can resume the original conversation. On the PSTN, calling features are always provided by the telephone company switchnot by the phone itself.

Despite historically increasing demand for features and gains in efficiency, POTS has been the most popular type of service provided by phone companies for the last several decades. Its core of a copper loop with an electromagnetic telephone receiver on one end and a central office switch on the other end hasn't changed much during that time. POTS' stalwart reputation and simplicity have been key reasons for its longevity.

So why not keep that copper telephone loop forever? POTS works great in low-density scenarios; that is, places with a small number of simultaneous callers, such as a one-family home. POTS can also excel where extensive calling features aren't important or where the telephone is rarely used. But when density and features become more critical, POTS isn't always the best solution.

Related Topic:

Become a Global VoIP Partner 

VoIP Basics

Become a Global VoIP Provider

Now a day VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) is one of the fastest growing and popular global telecommunication businesses around the world. You to can be part of this uprising and profitable business, everything you need some equipments and software to get you up and generating revenue quickly.

There are two types of billing system, Postpaid and prepaid. Prepaid Billing is the most popular type for VoIP service providers. Client pays advance payments and issue your own low cost personalized cards with PIN numbers.

The software for VoIP provide you with most everything you need including
Billing Software, VoIP gateways, and GSM cellular gateways, Softswitch etc.


Start your own Business:

 

Determine where you want to originate and terminate your VOIP traffic:
• For origination areas, try to choose some place that you know or reside in
 

• For termination areas, this may be less important since you will most likely utilize another service provider’s network
 

• Try to pick areas with known expensive long distance rates or telephone company controlled areas

 

Determine the amount of calls you will be making daily 

• Since you are most likely just starting out, your should start as small as possible to minimize up front expenses and learn the system.
 

• You can start with a small system of just (4) analog voice lines or a single
E1/ T1/ PRI digital line on your VoIP gateway.
 

• Pulse has Tenor systems capable of scaling to (32) E1/T1/PRI digital lines in a single chassis or GSM cellular access
 

• A good rule of thumb is (1) voice line for every (5) customers


Order your Internet connection 

• The size of your Internet connection is based the maximum number of calls you will be making at one time.
 

• Each call takes about 13-16kbps of bandwidth. If you will be making (8) simultaneous calls, you will need at least a 128kbps DSL or Cable modem connection. You may also get a T1 or E1 internet connection, but they are typically much more costly.
 

• Ask us about optional Packet Saver software for the Tenor VoIP gateways, we may be able to cut your Internet bandwidth needs in half.
 

• When ordering your internet connection you will need to order a STATIC IP address or a PUBLIC IP address.
 

• When ordering your internet connection make sure you get the required bandwidth in both directions. Some connections are slower in one direction.



What is Next ?What are you waiting for, call your Pulse representative now and get started in this fast paced, highly profitable business ! Pulsewan can help ypu to start your own VoIP Business. For more details visit : pulsewan.com

A brief discussion about VoIP basics

Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) is a technology for communicating using IP (Internet protocol) instead of traditional analog telephone systems. Some VoIP services need only a regular phone connection, while others allow you to make telephone calls using an Internet connection instead. Some VoIP services may allow you only to call other people using the same service, but others may allow you to call any telephone number - including local, PSTN, long distance, wireless, and international numbers.


How VoIP Works:
VoIP converts the voice signal from your telephone into a digital signal that can travel over the Internet. If you are calling a regular telephone number, the signal is then converted back at the other end. Depending on the type of VoIP service, you can make a VoIP call from a computer, a special VoIP phone or IP Phone, or a traditional phone with or without an adapter.
 

In addition, new wireless "hot spots" in public locations such as airports, parks, and cafes allow you to connect to the Internet, and may enable you to use VoIP service wirelessly. If your VoIP service provider assigns you a regular telephone number, then you can receive calls from regular telephones that don’t need special equipment, and most likely you’ll be able to dial just as you always have.

 

Most Common Equipment to run VoIP:You may need an Internet connection, and, for many types of VoIP calls, you need a broadband Internet connection. For information on broadband Internet connections, visit www.fcc.gov/cgb/broadband.html

Depending on the VoIP service you purchase, you may need a computer, a special VoIP telephone, or a regular telephone with an adapter. If you are calling a regular telephone number, the person you are calling does not need any special equipment, just a telephone.


How to use VoIP Service:
If you use a VoIP telephone or regular telephone, you place and receive calls much like you do with regular telephone service. If you use VoIP with your computer, a telephone icon usually appears on your computer screen. Clicking the icon allows you to dial numbers from a pad, or dial a call by clicking on a contact’s pre-programmed name and number. You will then hear a ring just like any other call. Computer-based VoIP services have a variety of ways for notifying you that you have an incoming call.

Some Advantages of VoIP:VoIP may offer features and services that are not available with more traditional telephone services. If you use VoIP, you can decide whether to pay the cost of keeping your regular telephone service.

You can also use your computer and VoIP service at the same time. You can also take some VoIP services with you when you travel and use them via an Internet connection.


Special Considerations for Using VoIP: If you’re considering replacing your traditional telephone service with VoIP, be aware that:
• Some VoIP service providers may have limitations to their 911 service. For more information on VoIP and 911 services, visit the FCC’s VoIP 911 Web site at
www.voip911.gov

• Some VoIP services don’t work during power outages and the service provider may not offer backup power.

• VoIP providers may or may not offer directory assistance/white page listings.
These factors may change with new developments in VoIP technology. You should always check with potential VoIP service providers to confirm any limitations to their service, including 911 service.


Difference between Making a Local Call and a Long Distance Call using VoIP:
Some VoIP providers do not charge for calls to other subscribers to the service. Some VoIP providers charge for a long distance call to a number outside your calling area, similar to existing, traditional wireline telephone service. Other VoIP providers permit you to call anywhere at a flat rate for a fixed number of minutes. Your VoIP provider may permit you to select an area code for your VoIP service that is different from the area code in which you live. Calls within your VoIP area code may not be billed as long distance calls. People calling your VoIP area code from another area code, however, may incur long distance charges.


The FCC (Federal Communications Commission) has worked to create an environment promoting competition and innovation to benefit consumers and, where necessary, has acted to ensure that VoIP providers.  

For more details http://www.fcc.gov/

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