VoIP Touches A New Tone

After years of red-hot growth, the VoIP market is showing signs of maturity and stability. This is not to say the growth is slowing down—far from it. The market is still poised for strong growth as small businesses take advantage of lower costs and new applications to move their phone systems and larger enterprises away from maintaining legacy analog lines. Solution providers are seeing a new class of customers interested in VoIP: they are larger and less willing to take chances with their data, security and applications than previous adopters. These customers generally need more training and support. Larger customers mean larger profit margins, but the sales cycle gets longer as a result.

Customers, regardless of size, are also demanding more from the technology. It's no longer enough to just get the phone system onto the IP network; they want video, too. VoIP VARs need to get used to talking about unified communications as customers look for ways to combine voice with other applications to increase productivity. Most importantly, the days of complicated infrastructure are numbered. VoIP has to play nice with the rest of the network to justify its deployment.

The Test Center evaluated a few of the current VoIP offerings from some of the major players in light of the maturing market. Each product varied in its approach. Some focused on small deployments. For example, D-Link Systems Inc.'s VoiceCenter, running Microsoft Corp.'s Response Point, is aimed at making the switch affordable and easy while making some advanced features, such as auto-attendant and call groups, available for the smallest customers. Digium Inc.'s Switchvox solution is simplifying large deployments while simplifying mashups and application development. And even others are integrating VoIP with rest of the network. Adtran Inc.'s latest line of NetVanta switches offer QoS and other networking tools. Cisco Systems Inc. remains focused on incorporating its networking gear with with VoIP, but it recently made large investments to include messaging, TelePresence and other collaborative technologies as part of the VoIP offering.

These products all have potential and clearly demonstrate that the trend is for integration, simplicity and ease of management.

Adtran NetVanta
Huntsville, Ala.-based Adtran positions its NetVanta family of switches for the SMB that requires enterprise-class features. The switches are combination IP-PBX, PoE switch and a QoS-enabled router. In August, the company introduced six new NetVanta switches, featuring 802.3af connectivity, wireless controller capabilities and Gigabit uplink ports. Three of these Layer 2 switches offer Gigabit Power-over-Ethernet and power conservation features to minimize the amount drawn. With these new NetVanta switches, the SMB can upgrade the LAN to higher speeds and more ports while investing in VoIP equipment.

NetVanta switches support non-blocking switching, VLANs, QoS Link Aggregation, TCL scripting and remote configuration capabilities. There are options for creating ring groups, auto-attendant, paging, user directories and call coverage lists. Analog, virtual and physical SIP phones are supported. Businesses can maintain existing analog lines, including direct support for up to 10 analog trunks. The system also supports fax machines and credit card readers without requiring adapters.

In addition to advanced networking features, the system gives businesses some flexibility. Office-in-a-box capabilities reduce the amount of cash outlay required to get networking infrastructure up and running for the branch office. Monitoring and management tools ensure voice quality is not degraded. The Voice Quality Monitoring suite allows administrators to examine the data stream and identify problems using a graphical user interface. With the VQM, both active and historical VoIP call statistics are accessible. The charts and graphs present overall network health as well as areas with problems in call quality. VQM looks at Mean Opinion Score, delay, jitter and dropped or out-of-order packets. The data can be searched on a variety of parameters. The NetVanta family also includes business gateways for hosted voice applications.

The company has aggressively pursued Cisco, often undercutting the giant's prices. Adtran already has some of the most generous warranties in the market and is currently offering limited lifetime warranties on its new switches.

Next: Cisco Smart Business Communications System