Siemens Learns The Hard Way To Deploy IP Phones

While IP telephony is still in its infancy, these studies and the real world experience of Siemens can help resellers position this technology, and better support their own customers once IP phones are more widely deployed.

The prototype, which was demonstrated at Microsoft's Fusion 2002 partner show in Los Angeles this week, is not yet commercially available. It takes advantage of Siemens' IP telephone/PBX gateways and Microsoft's Windows Messenger software. The notion is a powerful one: enable people on your Messenger buddy list to see when you are on the phone, just as they would view when you are on or offline with your computer.

But the technology can do more and goes further towards integrating computing and telephony. For example, users can type a short message in Messenger's chat screen and have that text sent directly to the phone's screen -- a useful tool for busy executives who want to queue up calls and know who their next call is coming from, while managing multiple conversations nearly concurrently. When this message is received, a telephone user can hit keys on the handset to reply, which go right back into Messenger's chat screens on the computer user's end. It is somewhat cumbersome to type extensive messages with the 12-keypad phones, but still useful for short replies, and Siemens can include a series of often-used replies similar to what the phone Short Messaging Service system users (Yes, No, Busy and will call back, etc.)

Siemens has developed this nifty technology as part of its research into what's wrong with IP telephony and how to make the overall convergence of computing and telephones smoother and more practical. They did this through the school of hard knocks, learning on the job as they built out a 1000-person office building in San Jose they call Skyport. The 300,000-square-foot facility employs Siemens' own IP telephony gear, and employees began moving into the building last October.

The company found some of the generally accepted IT principles didn't work well with its IP telephony system. "The traditional attitude that 10 minutes or less of network downtime is acceptable had to be replaced with the goal of five 9s reliability," according to a white paper published by the company. And telecom technicians had to give up their notions of being able to trace a single pair of wires from the main distribution frame back to each user's desktop, since IP phones can migrate around the building with their users with ease and without anyone having to reconfigure them.

The company developed test labs, letting users try out the IP phone technology, and they set up a joint IT and telecom task force in charge of implementing and troubleshooting the system, and enabled voice on the network one segment at a time to test for quality of service metrics and overall network performance. They also had to adjust the size of their phone wiring closets to handle the increased LAN switchgear and other equipment that were needed.

Siemens quickly found that the real issues were troubleshooting problems with their installation. One user's phone was replaced three times before a technician figured out that the problems with voice quality had to do with the improper configuration of the network's quality of service parameters. Many users had improperly configured their PCs for audio support, which affected how the "soft" telephony clients operated. And network technicians had to resist their urges to take down the network during business hours, otherwise users would lose dial tone on their phones.

Most of the kinks have been worked out, according to Siemens. And the real-world deployment experience has certainly helped ground their product development strategy.