Outsourced IP Telephony

By: Purushottam Koirala

Data Communication Engineer

Spice Nepal Pvt. Ltd.

Outsourced IP Telephony Options

Systems that the company owns are the most flexible, reliable, and scalable. With fully-owned systems, you’re also able to make the changes as soon as you need to make them, no waiting for a provider’s schedule to free up, no fees to be paid, and no miscommunication risks. However, hosted IP telephony is starting to gain some popularity. Savings are attracting businesses to hosted IP telephony solutions, especially small and medium-size businesses (SMBs) and those with multiple sites and organizations with highly mobile workforces. As a matter of fact, according to research firm In-Stat, hosted IP telephony will continue to experience dynamic growth with projected revenues exceeding $2 billion by 2010. The firm’s research also indicates that U.S. hosted IP telephony seats in service will continue to grow steadily to over 3 million in 2010, up from 373,000 in 2006. While outsourced IP growth is impressive, it’s not as impressive as the growth of IP telephony overall. A growing number of organizations have moved away from TDM technology to IP technology.

Outsourced IP Benefits

In addition to the costs saved when organizations benefit from fixed rate bundles for local, national and international calls, outsourced IP offers improved effectiveness with features like voice mail and unified messaging. Outsourced IP telephony also offers the flexibility enjoyed by in-house IP telephony, in that employees can log in to any phone make and receive calls as if it were his or her desk phone. Voice mail can be retrieved remotely from any phone, including cell phones, and it can be retrieved via e-mail. Costs are more predictable because of price bundling, and quite often the system is more reliable because call re-routing for business continuity and disaster recovery is automatic. For a monthly fee, the hassle of managing your own telephony solution can be offloaded and a provider deals with the headaches plus the monitoring and management of your IP telephony system. Now SMBs have access to a cost-effective, feature-rich alternative to on-premises IP PBXs and traditional analog phone systems. Hosted IP offered by service providers specifically targeting SMBs offer modern features, scalability, and ease-of-use designed to give small and mid-sized businesses the competitive edge they’ve been looking for when it comes to their telephony systems.

You’ve Got Choices

Service providers understand the importance of being a one-stop shop for customers, providing data, voice and video services to customers, which is why they’re building tremendous multi-service networks to support it all. Customers now have all kinds of choices–they’re no longer locked into voice services only from their incumbent local exchange carrier (ILEC). The competitive landscape has changed and competing service providers (SPs) offer multiple services over a converged network. Companies can now look to a variety of sources for IP telephony services, including ILECs, competitive LECs (CLECs), Internet SPs (ISPs), and Value-Added Resellers (VARs). The competition has opened up the opportunity to all kinds of business, large and small, and provided competitive pricing and advanced capabilities to make IP telephony the right choice for many companies.

IP Telephony Features Offered by Service Providers:

3 or 4-digit dialling

3-way calling

Automatic call distribution (ACD)

Authorization codes

Auto attendant

Call forwarding

Call park/call pickup

Call waiting

Caller ID

Conference Bridge

Direct inward dialling (DID)

Distinctive ring tones

E911 compliance

Follow me

Hunt Groups

International calling

Music on hold

Operator console

Voice mail

Web-based management portal

Managed IP Telephony

In the managed IP telephony model, the company owns the IP PBX, either on-site or in the provider network, while the carrier provides oversight and maintenance on it and offers bundled services (caller ID, auto-attendant, call redirect, and other voice-related applications). The service provider also supplies the customer premise equipment (CPE) for packetizing voice before it enters the wide area, and also includes Service Level Agreements (SLAs) to cover Quality of Service (QoS) and support. Managed IP telephony is a great option for businesses that want to try out IP telephony but aren’t ready to manage the system.

Hosted IP Telephony

Hosted IP PBX delivers IP telephony services to subscribers with cost reductions and improved business processes and customers do not need to be tied to the switch. The architecture is similar to a Centrex system or KTS (Key Telephone System), except a service provider rather than a local phone company provides switching along with the gateways to the PSTN. It is fully outsourced, and the customer utilizes the broadband IP network for voice and data without having to own or manage the switch. The only CPE (Customer Premise Equipment) necessary for IP telephony are the phones or converters if analog phones are used.

With hosted IP, all IP telephony components, from media gateways and switches to application servers are located at the service provider location (or data centre). This model is different from a managed IP PBX model, where the equipment can reside either on the customer premises or in the service provider data centre. In the hosted solution, the equipment supports many customers, whereas in the managed IP scenario, the IP PBX is dedicated to the use of one customer (not shared across customers).

The hosted solution is based on flat fees usually costing approximately $60 to $70 per month per station or user. In addition to an access line and IP telephony dial tone, the fee usually includes an a la carte selection of advanced features and an unlimited number of local and long distance minutes. For a multi-site organization, hosted IP telephony allows the sites to have the same capabilities, an abbreviated dialing plan (3 or 4-digit dialing, for instance), hunt groups, and uniform voice mail and auto-attendant for outside callers. The service also usually provides a web-based service management interface for IT administrators to manage moves, adds and changes (MACs) or to perform other tasks.

IP Telephony Access Service

Because many businesses already have their own PBX/IP PBX equipment and are looking to capitalize on that investment and keep network ownership costs down, IP telephony access service can help them do that. IP telephony access also serves as an introduction to converged network services. The service provider offers its customers whatever IP telephony capabilities it has in the data centre typically an abbreviated dialing plan, IP telephony VPN, hosted voice mail, and possibly a few others, all bundled together. The customer owns the PBX system so the service provider offers IP telephony through the same loop it’s already supplying to the customer (whether T-1 for large customers or broadband for smaller customers).