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Good Article: Quote: VoIP handsets: Greater choice means greater complexity
The aftershocks of SIP...
By Ben King
Published: Monday 1 August 2005
It used to be that handsets came as part of any IP telephony system. But with the advent of SIP, businesses have a number of options to choose from. Ben King tells you what to look for in this key VoIP component.
Handsets usually make up more than half the cost of buying a new office phone system but they generally get less than half the attention.
It used to be that once you had bought a private branch exchange (PBX) from one company, you had to buy phones from the same people if you wanted advanced features like voicemail to work. A cheap generic phone might give you a dial tone but little more.
As session initiation protocol (SIP) becomes more widely adopted for IP telephony, any compliant IP phone should be able to work with any compliant PBX, at least for the vast majority of functions. This gives buyers much more flexibility about the hardware they can choose but it also brings a whole new set of complexities to the process of choosing phones.
Mark Herbert, CEO of managed services provider intY, which uses SIP-compliant handsets and PBX from Zultys, says: "Using VoIP, for the first time you could go to an open standard. You weren't locked into a really expensive future model. We didn't want to get locked into a proprietary technology."
"The open standard thing was most attractive - I would never want to get locked into a single system," he adds. "If the Zultys system was no good we could switch it out, and still use the handsets with something else."
Brunel University is providing students with colour-screen Cisco handsets which display advertising; the Sheraton Hotel in Krakow, Poland offers room service and wake-up calls to its guests on a similar system.
Organisations now have a wide range of phones to choose from. New vendors such as Zultys and Snom have joined the market previously dominated by decades-old players such as Alcatel, Nortel and Siemens.
The cheapest phones, such as Grandstream's charmingly name Budgetone, sell for less than £50, while Cisco's mighty 7970 with colour screen sells for $695.
Most major manufacturers have SIP on their roadmaps for some point in the future but interoperability can't yet be taken for granted. For example, Cisco phones can work with IP-compliant PBXes but its PBXes won't work with phones from other vendors.
SIP is coming in the next version of Cisco's Call Manager IP-PBX system, which should arrive in the first half of 2006, according to the company.
Alcatel offers some interoperability but some phones may need a firmware upgrade to become fully SIP compliant.
At the moment, says Nigel Jones, general manager at Alcatel, this kind of compatibility is not the priority for his customers. Many of them will be looking to install an IP-based PBX to run alongside an existing PBX, and it's the compatibility between these two that they will value most. "They want the assurance that they have the functionality from the old world with the new world," he says.
It's true that SIP is still in the early days of its development. Some of the standards for the more advanced SIP-related features are not yet fully baked, so it's too early just to assume that any SIP-based handset will work with any SIP-based PBX. More advanced features are particularly likely to suffer from compatibility issues.
Sadly, it's these features which make up much of the rationale for switching to VoIP for many companies. "You can't sell it on cost at the moment," says intY's Herbert. "But if you have home workers they can be part of the call centre group. It brings them right into the system - it works really well."
Other simple applications might be an internal directory - the ability to look up anyone in the company from a conference room phone, for instance. The range of possible uses for these devices is almost limitless. Brunel University is providing students with colour-screen Cisco handsets which display advertising; the Sheraton Hotel in Krakow, Poland offers room service and wake-up calls to its guests on a similar system.
Choosing which features a business needs will be an important part of making a handset and PBX choice. If they just want a phone to speak into, then the very simple, low-end handsets might do the job very well.
If they are looking to deliver sophisticated XML-based apps to the phones, or even use them to replace PCs entirely, then the higher-end options will do better.
However, businesses should consider the future, too. XML-based apps might not fit into this year's budgets but two years down the line they may do.
John Delaney, principal analyst at research company Ovum, says: "If you are just investing in IP to save money, then you might go for the cheapest devices. But you have to consider the longer term potential to bring out new and innovative communication services."
Of course, wireless VoIP phones are becoming increasingly popular. They appeal to many companies for employees such as desktop support workers, who are constantly moving from desk to desk and would otherwise have to use a mobile. So-called soft phones which run on a PC are also taking off as they mean a company doesn't have to pay for a separate handset at all.
Many companies may end up using systems from several different vendors but this brings a separate set of problems.
Managing different desktop phones won't be as hard as keeping track of smart phones, laptops and PDAs but it will be harder than managing existing phones - particularly as sophisticated new devices will require more regular firmware upgrades.
Some firms are building enhanced internet-based management consoles onto their phones, to make this task simpler but with multiple vendors, the headache will increase.
Margaret Hopkins, associate at research company Analysys, says: "Manageability is something that is still being addressed in the context of SIP. There are bound to be ongoing upgrades."
The coming of SIP, and greater interoperability and choice in the phone market will mean an end to the exaggerated prices PBX vendors have charged in the past for their high-end fully featured phones.
Sadly that freedom isn't as total as it might first appear. Greater choice brings greater complexity, and IT managers will have to think carefully about the features they want from both handsets and PBXes when making their IP selections. | |
08-01-2005, 10:22 AM 
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