Chapter 11 Voice and Video Over IP

Chapter 11 Voice and Video Over IP

IP telephony (VoIP) gives you the ability to communicate via voice and/or video using an internet connection. This is a fairly new/old technology. In reality it started with the inventors of the telephone giving us the ability to transmit voice over copper wire. In the mid 1990s companies started testing with it however due to slower internet connection and less sophisticated data compression technologies the quality of these transmissions was sub-quality. Voices were garbled and transmissions were unreliable. With current technologies the VoIP arena has taken off like a rocket and in the next few years with the current state of the world economy we will see this become more and more widely used.

My current experiences using the VoIP technologies have saved our organization time and money. Examples of this are: We have been using the Vontage service for the last 4 to 5 years to communicate with our sales people in Europe, Asia and the UK. We are currently using Webex for conference calling, web presentations along with technical support. Then for the last year we have made it a standard for managers, sales and frontline information workers to use Skype as a softphone to communicate via voice and web cam. They are using it’s instant messenger feature to ping an online colleague to see if they are available to take a Skype call. In a cost comparison we are currently moving from WebEx to MicroSoft’s Live Meeting to further cut costs and give us better capabilities with our new Polycom CX5000 video conferencing equipment. http://www.polycom.com/products/voice/conferencing_solutions/microsoft_optimized_conferencing/cx5000.html Our next project research and move our outdated Nortel phone system to a hosted solution such as Microsoft Unified communications. http://www.microsoft.com/uc/en/us/default.aspx.