Ditch Your Telephone for VoIP?

Organizations looking to save on long-distance -- or even local -- phone calls may wish to consider adopting VoIP, a technology that enables you to make calls over the Internet for significantly less than the cost of a traditional phone call, or even for free.

To learn about the ins and outs of VoIP, check out Lasa's article Ditch Your Telephone for VoIP on TechSoup.

What has been your organization's experience with VoIPs? Have you used them internationally? Locally? What have been the benefits or drawbacks? Share your stories here.

Be prepared for outages with VoIP. This past year on of the largest VoIP providers was overloaded and had a 3 day outage. Before dumping all of you existing phone lines for VoIP ask if can survive a three days without phone service. This is not the first outage either.

You will also lose telephone services if you Internet services has problems. But this can also happen to phone service too.

VoIP will work during power outages, but only if you have UPSs to power your router, hubs, switches, and other networking equipment required for VoIP.

Some things to think about.

VoIP traffic has no security or encryption.

VoIP traffic is not secure and for $19.99 one can purchase a program to listen in on any VoIP call in your path in real time. There’s a free program, but it’s a little more complicated. It will take 5 minutes to learn how to use it.

Both programs save VoIP calls as MP3 files.

Are these programs legal? Yes – But who uses them to do what is in question. The FBI needs a warrant, but the President of the US does (if you are considered a terrorist), ordinary people can use the programs to capture the traffic as long as you don’t listen to the actual call.

There are program out there (very expensive) that can analyze the network traffic data or data packets looking for data patterns and comparing the pattern against a dictionary of words. It works well enough that more money is being spent to refine the technology.

Guess who is using them and for what?

Is this legal? Since the call is technically not being listed or recorded you guess is as good as mine. Only a court case will tell.

as a confirmed VoIP addict I will happily join in this discussion.
I use VoIP trunking to connect all my sites, over a WAN that I control. I Use Wireless VoIP over an 802.11b network for a large number of our nurses and nuses aides. our nurse call system is hooked into that system so that the assigned nurse and aide can always reach the resident quickly. because we are a healthcare organization HIPAA applies therefore there has to be encryption on the VoIP calls. especially communications with patients via Voice over WiFi.

I am not saying that my encryption cant be broken but I am putting reasonable protections in place.

VoIP on the public internet does have potential issues. power outages being one of them youthfullness being another. the VoIP providers are not truly carrier grade yet. they will get there though, and the big ones are stepping up because they need to compete with the established providers.

I don't think of eavesdropping as a major problem, with the PSTN all anyone ever needed to do was stick a couple of wires on a line and they could happily if illegally record all your calls. the same is true of VoIP. honestly how hard is it for someone to walk up to your house and attach a device to a wire. That said if you want secure VoIP calls they are easier and cheaper to achieve than PSTN encrytion and there are secure VoIP services available.

http://www.xten.net/news/20040127.pdf

http://sourceforge.net/projects/javafon

Just thought I'll add an international window to this discussion...

Most parts in the developing world are struggling to keep up with the infrastructure demands for the 'new technologies'. Add comaparatively high(as compared to text) demands of a digital voice signal. And the visual that emerges is akin to being an SUV owner, clogging the limited network highways and resources.

Personally, I continue to use the telephony network to make calls back home to India, inspite of early familiarity with technologies like skye - just trying to be a resposible world citizen!

my two cents...

I have been using VOIP at home for almost a year now. I had an SBC landline with DSL on it. The benefit was that if the VOIP technology failed, I still had the landline as backup. However, I had to still pay for the SBC landline because you cannot have a "DSL" only line with SBC. After a year, I decided to switch to Comcast cable Internet & disconnected my SBC line. I use Sunrocket VOIP and my monthly cost is about $16.40. I've noticed some outages on occasion, but it has been reliable most of the time, especially after switching to Comcast (not sure why, so I cannot be certain the connectivity is really better). I can see low-end VOIP being deployed to some small NPO offices. However, we have not done so yet as potential downtime is something to consider. I guess I'm still the "beta tester" for my organization. I know that enterprise VOIP installations are reliable, it is just the small VOIP installations where reliability/quality might suffer, depending on various factors (vendor, connectivity, etc.).

I am a skype addict and I frequently call Beijing from San Francisco, For free communications, it can't be beat. I was wondering whether anyone has tried Google talk yet?

What are the advantages over Skype, if any?

Also, would you all be interested in an online event, here on TechSoup, with a click to call functionality (using Google talk, possibly), where we cuold actually talk to each other? Would this be something that you would want to participate in? I am just surveying interest here, and not making any plans.

Our testing lab performed a test comparing GoogleTalk with Skype. Skype out performed GoogleTalk in all areas except one, GoogleTalk's ring tone.

Just to add some clarification, Skype is proprietary VoN or VoIP and the traffic is completely encrypted on Skype to Skype calls. So far Skype’s encryption has not been broken. There are several three letter organizations in the US willing to pay anything for a program that can undue Skype’s encryption.

VoIP can not be encrypted. If it were encrypted you would not have interoperability between the different VoIP providers. That’s why a VoIP call to a Skype user has to use Skypein.

As for “taping” into a POTS call. You are right. You would have to attach wires to someone’s demark box at someone’s house or on climb a telephone pole to “tap in”.

With a VoIP call, it’s so much easier. If you use DSL or cable modem customer one could tap-in to all VoIP traffic in your neighborhood. (Not that I have ever tried.) By definition Ethernet is a shared medium, carrier sense multiple access with collision detection (CSMA/CD) or think of it as a party line. Your machine already receive all of the traffic, all you need is a program like Microsoft’s NetMon to analyze it. And Microsoft’s Windows’s Media Player does an excellent job of playing VoIP telephone calls.

How secure is VoIP over 802.11 WiFi) and 802.16 WiMax? Wireless VoIP traffic is less secure. Like Ethernet, wireless is also a shared medium, (technically 802.11 is NOT Ethernet) but unlike Ethernet which is travles over wires, wireless is in the air. All one has to do is sniff the traffic. The equipment needed? A laptop with a wireless card.

In the US it is illegal to listen in on phone calls without permission. However, there are exceptions. One of them being a technical technician who is testing to ensure everything is working properly. If you are responsible for the network where you work, then I guess you could be considered that technician? (I am not a lawyer.) The only way to know is to have a case decided in court.

Aside from the exceptions, in the US it is illegal to listen in or record telephone conversations without prior permission. Don’t do it. And even though there are free programs and $20 programs that make this so easy to do the laws will prevent it and protect us.

Non-profits outside the US might be very interested in VoIP. It will allow you to have a US number even though you are located in another country. It will give you a “were in the US” appearance if that would be helpful for your organization.

This may sound sneaky or dishonest, but businesses have been doing this for years and there is nothing illegal about it in the US. It maybe in the country you are in.

Last summer I was in Europe and set up two organizations with US phone numbers. It works perfectly.

I don't think it sounds sneaky or dishonest. It sounds reasonable, and you can do it with skype, for a price (well under $100.00).

I guess it's all in how you present yourself. Citibank, CompUSA and CircuitCity and other have been doing it. These people are trained to pretend they are in the United States, (given sports scores, and US weather info) when really they are on the other side of the world. (But they won’t tell you that.)

I call that sneaky.

Especially because when you give them your personal information US laws don’t apply. Citibank had personal info stolen at one of their call centers outside the US, now what?

We should probably refrain from citing laws when we really aren't lawyers, nor do we have any proof of them. Besides, it is, once again, off-topic.

Now, back to VOIP...

There are other alternatives out there that are almost free that I'm surprised don't get used more often. Anyone that is into online gaming is aware of two programs - Ventrilo and Teamspeak - that allow 2-to-dozens of people to talk together at any time. Someone rents or creates a server slot somewhere (easily less the $10 a month and can even be done for free) and the client-side software is free. Each person just needs a headset with a mic plugged into their computer's sound card. I know that some companies use Ventrillo for conference calling (it is what it was designed for, as I understand it). My son's friend moved overseas recently and they talk all the time on Teamspeak, free of charge, for as long as they want. Some buddies and myself were just online all afternoon talking, including several from Mexico, Canada, and Finland, and it didn't cost us a penny because there is no "phone company" invovled, it is run off our own server. In business use you would need to have an established relationship at both ends that are set up for it, such as branch offices, so you can just IM the other party that you need to chat and both go online. Never would replace a regular phone, but THE cheapest way to talk to folks around the world, no question. Google either name and find out more for yourself if interested, or visit www.ventrilo.com for example.

If folks feel this it off-topic, then delete it I guess. But I suspect someone out there might find this info useful. I don't work for the either software maker, but if you have a question, feel free to let me know.

I had the same concern of "what happens if my internet connection is down?" I just ordered VOIP service through Packet 8 two weeks ago. They have a neat feature where if my internet connection is down, they will forward calls to alternate numbers (like a cell phone). Not ideal for a large organization that relies on extensions, but it's better than being down.

I just posted a blog entry about my VOIP experience this morning. Feel free to check it out for what it's worth.

For an organization, perhaps not for individuals, but it can be for individuals, but probably more for the organization, we must mention Asterisk, perhaps the largest step forward in telephony in years, maybe many many years. Yes, I am 100% biased. (our organization, www.sjobeck.com, installs & integrates Asterisk) Regardless, www.asterisk.org, has got to be mentioned as a software that goes so very far in benefiting anyone in need of telecommunications of any kind any where in the world. Many are using it over sat' links now. Others convert calls to VoIP, send to another location, then convert back. The possiblities are endless. The software is free. We expect a huge surge in the use of Asterisk starting yesterday through the next decades.

Peace. Love. Linux.

Jason Sjobeck