The Future of Telephony-VoIP

A vibrant present sets the stage for a glorious future. The Ip phone systems and cellular systems are slowly increasing their reach in the market. In the modernized countries there is saturation in the number of connections and the number of connections is growing in the developing countries.

A telephone is now an essential means of communication and the mobile revolution is carrying the concept of communication to greater vistas. Internet revolution has carried through the concept of information explosion and is now being promoted as replacement for the Traditional telephone system.

VoIP has still to find popular acceptance. Its rate of acceptance is increasing. It is evident in the increased sales and market shares of Voice over internet telephony related products. Mobile and Cellular companies are joining the band wagon by enabling voip facilities on their mobiles. Yet in all the hype of the market, the question asked is that: Is this new technology voip beneficial to me? Voip benefits are being marketed by voip service providers and manufacturers. With ever increasing traffic volumes on the net and security problems newer standards and solutions need to be offered. This is the delay in universal acceptance.

Weighing The Benefits of VoIP

Problems exist in every scenario and choice is based on the fact of advantages of voip and its disadvantages.

POTS and Its Problems

Looking at the old telephone system and its services

• Toll charges in long distance carriers are quite substantial
• You pick up your telephone and your connection is to a PSTN exchange over a line of small bandwidth
• Your analog voice gets converted to digital signal only at the Central Office.
• Your call goes across various lines and exchanges belonging to various companies who collect toll charges.
• Your dedicated line cost much because it is not optimally used. Thus there is wastage of bandwidth and time on a single call. You pay for this wastage.
• You cannot have a voice conference or video conference on your traditional phone since it is dedicated connection between two persons only.
• Even the POTS or an ISDN line can be used to link to the internet. The major disadvantage is that they are too slow to download large files of high resolution graphics and cannot be used in real time applications reliably.

Telephony Features

Best features of telephony are as follows

Traditional Telephony

The traditional telephone offers three main features. Call processing, maintenance and providing a continued connection during call. Other additional features provided free or for some basic payment are

• Call transfer
• Direct Inward Dialing
• Customised Abbreviated dialing (Speed Dialing)
• Voice mail
• Follow-me
• Call forwarding on absence
• Call forwarding on busy
• Music on hold
• Automatic ring back
• Night service
• Call distribution (ACD, fixed sequences, ...)
• Call waiting
• Call pick-up
• Call park
• Call conferencing
• Custom greetings
• Shared message boxes (where a department can have a shared voicemail box)
• Automated directory services (where callers can be routed to a given employee by keying or speaking the letters of the employee's name)
• Call accounting
• Caller ID

VoIP Telephones

• Caller ID
• Call Waiting
• Conference Calling
• Call Forwarding
• Redial last outgoing number
• Call Transfer
• Call Logs
• ; Message Waiting Light
• Hold
• One touch access to Voice Mail messages
• Speed Dial Lists
• Call blocking feature to block calls from anonymous callers
• Customized ringing tones
• Line indicators on multi-line sets show when a line is used and which line has a voice mail message.