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JANET(UK) VoIP Event September 2004

Post-meeting Summary and Questionnaire Responses | Summary of Responses to Pre-meeting Questionnaire | Comments and Next Steps | Conclusions

Post-meeting Summary and Questionnaire Responses

The JANET(UK) VoIP event in London on 15 September 2004 was held both to realise VoIP requirements, and to understand what VoIP activities are happening within the JANET community.

Meeting Summary

Following on from four presentations given by Roger Bolam, Arron Bowley, Nathan Prisk and Phil Davison, the group held an open discussion on VoIP. An overview of this discussion is provided below:

• Return on Investment for VoIP. It was noted that at this stage it is likely VoIP will not offer an initial return on investment. This does of course depend on the type of VoIP being used, i.e. a full VoIP install or simply using free propriety VoIP clients. In particular it also depends on whether VoIP is being considered for new buildings or campuses. Obviously a full VoIP infrastructure is going to have a much higher cost than using a free VoIP client.
  
  A number of other benefits of VoIP were discussed, such as using an existing data infrastructure for telephony, certain VoIP solutions such as remote log-in for telephony and increasing flexibility. Although these may not directly reduce costs, the extra features offered by VoIP have the potential to enhance current voice services.

• Usage of software VoIP clients. The issue of using free VoIP clients such as SKYPE was discussed, the main point of concern being the way in which SKYPE may use host PCs as a repeater. Although this is not ideal - the use of the technology ultimately lies with local usage policies - the use of SKYPE on JANET is not against any acceptable usage policy.

• Linking Call Managers. The possibility of linking Cisco Call Manager servers together to enable people to make VoIP calls to other Call Manager users outside of their LAN was discussed. While this would be of benefit to Call Manager users it does not address non-Call Manager site requirements. It was suggested that this may be a useful short term pilot for trialling VoIP on JANET, but would probably not be offered as an actual service.

• Providing SIP "Services" on JANET. At present JANET allows SIP traffic. Providing advice and guidance to VoIP users as well as a central numbering scheme was discussed as a possible service scenario. Generally this was received well: however, this does not address the problem of sites making calls outside of their campus network if a proprietary VoIP solution is being used.

• Issues with merging IT and telecoms.  A major concern that was raised was the issue of where VoIP as a technology 'sits' within an organisation. In the majority of cases the management of telephony sits within a separate department to IT or data. VoIP as a technology falls within both areas. Sites raised issues of seeing this problem as a major hurdle. It was suggested that any organisation thinking of using VoIP could use a JANET(UK) mailing list to discuss these issues, with both the telecoms and IT departments of each organisation subscribing.

Summary of Responses to Pre-meeting Questionnaire

Prior to the event a pre-meeting questionnaire was handed to all attendees. The questionnaire was intended to help JANET(UK) understand how VoIP is used within the JANET community.

Ninety percent of the forms were returned.

Summary of Responses

• Do you currently use VoIP at your organisation? Briefly describe how you use VoIP and the equipment you use.

On the whole there was an even distribution of those who had no VoIP technologies and those who had dabbled. The majority of those who had dabbled had done so using the Cisco Call Manager platform and one of sites had also used IPMux's, taking E1 traffic and packetising information between sites to be reassembled at the other end and delivered as traditional telephony.

• What factors did you consider before purchasing the equipment? (i.e. PBX replacement, PSTN breakout, routing VoIP traffic on JANET).

Roughly half the forms commented on this question and the responses are concluded below:

• Age and relevance of existing TDM equipment and existing cabling infrastructure
• Migration of systems
• Single point of failure (voice and data)
• VoIP over JANET
• PBX replacement
• Integration with existing PBX

 

• Do you use VoIP to communicate outside of your organisation's LAN?

The majority of sites answered 'no': however a few pointed out that they used Keycom to backhaul some campus VoIP traffic (mainly from student halls of residence).

• What central VoIP services and / or VoIP supporting services would you like to see offered on JANET?

Interesting answers from this question ranged from:

• "Possibility of interconnecting an interface to interlink institutions"
• "Negotiating a cheap PSTN breakout with mobile providers"
• "a similar service as to that being offered at the present with Videoconferencing"
• "VoIP PSTN gateway"

 

• What plans do you have for VoIP over the next 5 years?

The large majority of forms had answers to this, thus illustrating that VoIP, if not being used now, is at least being planned for at JANET connected organisations.

Comments

• "Technology needs to prove itself on campuses of over 14,000 extensions"
• "Would like to migrate services to VoIP before existing TDM PBX warranty expires"
• "CTI (computer telephony integration) and Wireless"
• "VoIP over JANET"
• "Migrate a campus to VOIP by 2006"
• "Complete move to VoIP technologies in the next 5-10 years"

Conclusions and Next Steps

At this stage it would seem that there are early adopters of VoIP technology within the JANET community. The majority of these have installed VoIP PBX systems and now would like the systems / infrastructure to communicate with other systems / infrastructures via JANET.

There also appears to be a significant proportion of sites looking to migrate to VoIP technologies that are still tethered to existing PBX systems. It is likely that these sites will interconnect existing systems with VoIP technologies.

Computer to computer VoIP activity across the internet or JANET seemed to be accepted and used by a large number of sites.

Until a hard standard is adopted for VoIP, or a significant amount of VoIP gateway technology is developed, it is impossible to create a fully managed VoIP 'service' on JANET.

As a next step JANET(UK) is planning to form a VoIP Advisory Group discussion list. The aim of the list is to stimulate discussion on VoIP within the JANET community, and to further understand how a small scale pilot / trial can be conducted over JANET.