Survivor's Guide to 2005: Digital Convergence

All for One: Benefits

When you place multiple IT resources on one pipe, you have only one pipe to manage. This reduces administration costs and eliminates several "line" items in your IT budget, such as those for serial cards that interface voice and data and separate telephone lines to the desktop.

While you're moving to one pipe, you can easily add video. There's a videoconferencing system for everyone, no matter what the size of the organization or budget. Voice, together with video, puts speakers in the same virtual room. Videoconferencing eliminates bad conference calls resulting from disparate or old phone systems and will wake up inattentive remote staffers (they'll think twice before multitasking during your conferences).

All for One: Risks

Of course, joining our three (percent) musketeers is not without risks. As any data manager will tell you, when you increase the number of packets traversing a network, you increase the chances that packet loss and transmission delays will degrade network and application performance. Lost packets and long delays on the network reduce call reliability, as well as voice and video quality.

To counteract such problems, you must institute QoS schemes like DiffServ (Differential Services) and RSVP (Resource Reservation Protocol). These let you increase the traffic on your network while guaranteeing QoS for voice and video. Data traffic isn't compromised, and you don't have to overprovision bandwidth.

Another risk is that converged technologies might be new to your staff or traditionally handled by the non-IT telecom department. You must set aside funds for training and/or work out a collaboration plan.Finally, there's the lock and load problem. That is, a proprietary approach locks your network into one vendor and loads services as they're developed and released by that vendor. Rather than invest in a one-system architecture, look for vendors and equipment supporting open standards. This will help you keep your options open. Standards also lower the costs for application developers because libraries and code can be shared with multiple applications.

First, Add Voice

If you're in the market for a new PBX, consider VoIP. Organizations with multiple PBXs in geographically dispersed locations make a good case for VoIP because of the flexibility it provides.

In terms of acquisition, installation and operation, an IP-PBX costs less than a conventional PBX. It's easy to plug everyone into the IP network and administer it from one location; reconfiguring call centers is simple; and bandwidth savings are likely when voice is packet-based rather than TDM-based. Finally, IP telephony can provide both failover and survivability features when clustered with other servers or combined with a product like the Cisco Integrated Services Router 2800 or 3800 Series that supports CME (Call Manager Express). Hey, if a server goes down or a WAN link fails, you won't have to look for a pay phone.If your enterprise has a WAN, using an IP infrastructure for voice will not only reduce your telephone bill and your reliance on the phone company to route calls; by using compression techniques like G.711 with silence suppression, you can add up a bandwidth savings on circuits (calls) using VoIP instead of analog trunk lines.

New IP voice applications are possible with the adoption of the Session Initiation Protocol. SIP uses a peer-to-peer scheme that gives endpoints the intelligence to initiate calls and tap into other network services. However, as exciting as SIP is, beware of empty promises. Few vendors have significant third-party support for SIP endpoints.

Microsoft's plans for SIP include new features in its forthcoming Istanbul desktop OS in 2005. Microsoft, an early proponent of SIP, claims Istanbul will support PBX systems from competing vendors. It remains to be seen how far Microsoft will venture into VoIP.

Converged call centers can use applications running over IP--such as CRM and helpdesk software--and save you money by eliminating the need to administer separate applications on the legacy PBX. Key considerations in moving to an IP call center are remote access and integration. Remote agents can field calls from any location, and routing those calls can be done using the corporate LAN/WAN and not the phone company, saving the enterprise toll charges.

So far, the shift in call centers has been done by small and midsize companies that haven't invested in call agents and legacy equipment to the same extent as larger organizations.Next, Show Some Video

Videoconferencing over IP can reduce travel time for executives and other employees and cut the costs of transmitting audio and video over expensive ISDN lines. In addition, new products, such as Polycom's VSX 3000 and VCon's Vigo, are moving videoconferencing from complex, expensive boardrooms setups to inexpensive, easy-to-use desktop systems.

ISDN still commands much of the videoconferencing market, but it's expensive--each circuit (call) has high per-minute fees associated with each channel. But before you kiss your ISDN lines goodbye, there are some things you must know about video and the network to keep bandwidth requirements low and maintain video quality for conferencing.

First, let's talk about quality in videoconferencing. There's no need for the approximately 30 frame-per-second, full-motion support on your desktop that you have on television. You can get by with 10 to 15 fps as long as no one starts dancing on the conference table. With today's compression for audio and video, this translates to about 128 Kbps to 768 Kbps for an IP-based H.323 videoconference.You'll need the bandwidth to support the number of simultaneous sessions in use. Remember that the bandwidth is symmetric--each endpoint transmits and receives at the same rate. If endpoints negotiate a 384-Kbps session, both endpoints require that bandwidth. And if you employ an MCU (multichannel unit) to orchestrate a conference with multiple endpoints, it must receive streams from all participants and forward them back to each of them. Therefore, it requires the bandwidth equal to the number of participants multiplied by the bandwidth required for one session (N x bandwidth per call).

As for dropped packets, even 1 percent loss results in some missing audio and blocky video. A packet loss of more than 2 percent is not acceptable for H.323. As for latency, delays exceeding 200 milliseconds will be acceptable for you only if you're the type who uses a walkie-talkie and has rabbit ears on his television. If not, look to QoS strategies.

The QoS tools available for video are the same tools used for VoIP. The most useful to the network are DiffServ, RSVP and Priority Queueing. Converged networks will most likely need to support all three.

Costs for these complete packages will drop next year as competition heats up among Polycom, Tandberg and VCon, and as new players like Sony enter the enterprise market. For example, Polycom's VSX 3000 is both a videoconferencing appliance and an LCD display for desktop computers, and now Tandberg and Sony have introduced similar appliances.Finally, All-for-One Communications

UM (unified messaging) joins voice messaging, e-mail and fax with conventional PBXs. Legacy PBXs use serial line cards to communicate directly with fax servers and IP-based e-mail servers. UM lets you retrieve multiformat messages from a telephone or from e-mail applications using text-to-speech or speech-to-text conversion; or by attaching voicemail (wav file) or faxes (graphic file) to e-mail. When you replace that PBX with an IP-PBX, you no longer need serial line cards to communicate with IP-based technologies. UM becomes UC, or unified communications.

UC on a converged network can use existing IP resources and protocols, including XML and SIP. It integrates with LDAP directories, instant messaging, calendars and collaboration applications to take advantage of presence management and alert users to incoming messages. Then it delivers those messages in formats for each user's preferred application, such as e-mail. If, as a nomadic road warrior, you have no preference, UM will hunt you down to deliver messages based on a configurable rules-based policy. All this makes UC sound like the next killer app, but the price has to go down before UC even comes close to replacing e-mail.

Currently, UM enjoys 22 percent penetration in enterprises, according to the Telecommunications Industry Association. But that 22 percent represents high-profile users only, because of the high cost per seat and the complexity of distributing the application throughout the enterprise. Adhering to standards like SIP that get away from conventional, proprietary PBX development will increase options and decrease costs. Advances in speech recognition and text-to-speech engines also will cut prices, but we may have to sit it out in 2005.If you want to investigate UM, look at Accpac's Messenger Series 2.0. It works with an IP infrastructure and boasts many features of expensive UM systems like Siemens HiPath 8000 at a lower price.

Sean Doherty is a technology editor and lawyer based at our Syracuse University Real-World Labs®. Write to him at [email protected].

Convergence

1. What prevents your enterprise from rolling out a VoIP system?

2. Do you have competent network managers to converge voice, video and data?

3. Do you have QoS on your network?

4. Do you use video for corporate communications?

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