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.
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