Leaping Into The VOIP

Recently we shifted our company from Plain Old Telephone Service (POTS) to Voice over IP (VoIP). To my surprise, even though designing, creating and deploying new technology is our business, I was a bit apprehensive. I am assuming that this is a valuable reminder of what it is like to be on the other side of the table.

POTS is what telephone service has been since it was conceived: copper wires carrying signals from one telephone handset to another, with lots of switching and amplification in between.

I was comfortable with POTS, with faxes, with modems, with copper wires and splitters and the like. When we built new offices some 15 years ago, I had made sure that there were plenty of phone lines coming into our office: some for our internal PBX (that thing known to most as "the phone system"), some for our fax machines, some for our modems.

I was so comfortable with POTS that this transition was put off for a really long time and much of it happened when I wasn't looking.

Over the years, faxing migrated from special purpose fax machine hardware to fax servers and the like (Open Source fans that we are, we used HylaFax). We still needed a fax line, but not so many.

Broadband Internet access and the rise of Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) pretty much killed the need for modems as a way to access client resources from afar, so we stopped using them, even from the road.

The jump to smart phones had been carefully planned: we waited until we felt that they were mature enough to allow us to abandon our Personal Digital Assistants or PDAs (we were using Palm devices) to hold our contacts, handle our calendars, keep our secrets and track our billable time. Once smart phones could do all that, we went to smart phones instead of mobile phone + PDA.

When we finally adopted smart phones (we decided to go with iPhones for a variety of reasons), we suddenly found our desk-bound phones to be kind of a drag. We wanted to deal with only one phone system, but we didn't want to give our mobile phone numbers, nor did we want to lose the basic business functions of having a central phone system.

So we decided to go with a virtual PBX from RingCentral. This gives us the PBX features, but we can also run their smart phone app and use our smart phones as business handsets as well. So our business calls follow us around (during business hours) and I have reclaimed some precious desk space from the hulking handset. Our faxing is also handled through our virtual PBX.

It has been a couple of months now and we are very happy with the lower overhead, the feature set, the convenience and the greater access to our voice mail and our faxes. The computer room is much tidier without all those phone connections, the old hardware PBX and the line conditions, etc.

So why was I apprehensive? It was not the change to VoIP: I know that technology inside and out. In a previous incarnation, over ten years ago, I got Net2Phone's protocol up and running on a VoIP phone we were developing and their tech folks to whom I demonstrated it were very impressed as I was the first external person to get their protocol working on a non-computer. I spent hours making phone calls using VoIP and writing software to support VoIP. I am comfortable that the technology is even better now.

It was not the cost:benefit analysis which our operations person did and clearly showed that it was time.

Upon reflection, I think that it was inertia and simple unreasoning fear of change. Exactly the sort of thing that I have to fight in my clients when I create new technology for them to streamline their processes and better integrate their systems.

I respect fear of change: careful consideration is a good idea before every big decision. I understand better than most that not all change is good and that tearing apart the present does not guarantee that you will assemble a better future.

But I don't respect procrastination or paralysis by analysis: may God grant me the wisdom to know the difference.