Hosted PBX Telephone Systems

Are businesses ready to trust the internet for their telephones?

No!

And rightly so, because to date, when it comes to businesses, most solutions have not been ready for prime time!

The use of the internet for telephone systems is not a new idea. Residential "voice-over IP systems" have existed for many years and there are many successful providers of services to this market, but businesses have been slow to adopt this technology. Why?

Businesses are very demanding users of telecom services
and they need excellent call quality and equipment reliability.

Many "voice over IP" suppliers, those who have come out of the residential market, have not been able to provide a consistently reliable product suitable for a business. While residential users can tolerate a little warble, jitter, dropped calls and call placement problems - businesses will lose customers if calls drop. And call placement problems reduce productivity and increase frustration.

The "call quality" that early residential system suppliers could provide, initially, was poor. Many users reported having problems with echoes, stuttering or jitter. In a residential application, the user can call back "to get a better line" - but in a business situation, there is little tolerance for the waste of time.

Unlike residential applications, businesses need to make a number of simultaneous calls from their location, which requires more capacity on the network connection. Until recently, the required digital capacity to make multiple concurrent, high-quality calls - cost as much, or more, than the phone lines replaced by the system, so the business case was poor. Dead in the water!

And businesses need more calling features than just a phone line. They need more extensive call handling and switching capabilities not provided by residential systems.

So it is small wonder that businesses have been reticent to trust the "life blood" of their business communication to a technology that might not be ready for prime time!

But technology moves forward, and old problems find solutions! Enter Fibernetics with a new and unique approach to the problem. A few relevant facts:

First - the major telephone companies have been using digital switching technologies, which break phone calls into digital "voice packets", for many years. The only part of the solution that has not been digital, for many customers, is the so-called "last mile" on the local loop that completes the path into your business or home.

Second - an approach taken by many vendors has been to provide a digital solution over a standard internet connection. This is inherently the weakest link in the chain because the line from your home or business, even at 5 megabits per second or more, is often the slowest part of the network, and people often use the same link for both voice and data. Therefore your phone calls are competing with, say, the iTunes download running on your computer.

Third - most of the other solutions in the marketplace rely on one service provider to provide internet service (ISP), another to provide the IP telephone service (ITSP), and a third (a telephone company carrier) to provide the link to the public telephone network (PSTN). Is it any wonder that reliability has suffered, with all of those links in the chain?

Fibernetics is a "CLEC", or "competitive local exchange carrier". This is a term for a recognized telephone company carrier, as defined by the Canadian Radio Telephone and Telegraph Commission (CRTC) - the body that regulates telephone carriers in Canada. The CRTC defines specific requirements that must be met for a company to obtain such a designation. The company must prove that it has robust facilities that can be reliably interconnected directly with the public telephone network, as provided by the major incumbent local exchange carriers (eg. Bell Canada, Telus, MTS, Alliant). As a CLEC, Fibernetics has had to show that they have professional, reliable, secure and fault-tolerant data centres. To achieve a CLEC certification is not a simple undertaking. It provides an assurance that the company can provide its clients with a dependable phone service.

Fibernetics is an ISP. This allows them to offer both voice and data services over one link to the customer, and they have the ability to control how information flows over that service. This is important because the most problematic part of any voice over IP solution is usually in the first hop - the ISP. The "pipe" to the customer is the most common place with VOIP problems occur. Too often - this pipe is not large enough, or voice packets are delayed by data traffic. As the ISP, Fibernetics can ensure that their service will accord the priority to voice services so that voice traffic flows smoothly and consistently. Other competitors who are not carriers or internet providers are NOT able to set "quality of service" conditioning, as this would require support from the ISP, so they cannot guarantee priority to voice services, as is required when you move beyond a simple casual implementation, such as in a residential implementation.

Both Open Systems Group and Fibernetics are established companies who can provide one-stop shopping for all of the required products and services to set up a new digital communications capability. Customers can take comfort that there is more behind this solution than a one-man shop with a business card and a website. Customers will appreciate the range of services and support capability that can be offered both by Open Systems Group and Fibernetics.

And Fibernetics' solution is ready for prime time. As they are an equipment manufacturer, the ISP, and the telephone company, the Fibernetics solution is configured so that "voice" receives priority at all times, throughout all phases of call handling. So regardless of loads, or calling volumes, you are assured that call quality will always be consistent and high. No other vendor is in a position to provide such a guarantee, or as cost effective a solution.

Using its internet facilities, Fibernetics creates a virtual private network between the customer's premises and the CO where the switch facilities are located. All voice communications are accorded a QoS prioritization that ensures excellent call quality at up to 20 calls per standard DSL connection. Then, once at the co-location facility, Fibernetics can provide a direct link to the ILEC, establishing a connection directly to the PSTN ensuring seamless handling of the traffic in the handover.

UNIQUE ADVANTAGES

• QoS Traffic shaping for both data and voice to coexist
• Each call consumes approx. 20kbps
• Traffic Shaping prioritizes the voice packets
• 10% of the bandwidth is reserved to avoid queuing
• VPN and IAX trunking allows for provisioning/remote diagnosis for voice trunks from any network.

CUSTOMER PREMISES EQUIPMENT

• Traffic Shaping and QoS with Advance VPN and Firewall
• PPPoE Provisioning for DSL Clients
• DHCP, NTP and FTP for local SIP telephony
• Voice provisioning using SPEEX Codec and IAX Trunking
• Aggregation of local routing of internal calls
• Blue Tooth presence management, VPN Provisioning and Web based user interface for local configuration

PROVIDER EQUIPMENT AT CENTRAL OFFICE

• TDM Trunking
• IVR Hosting
• Voicemail Hosting
• Web-based user interface for client PBX
• CPE provisioning services
• Conference Bridging
• Routing for Multi-Branch, virtual PBX

Fibernetics provides 24 / 7 customer support for "how to" questions or to help with technical issues or problem resolution on customer systems. Open Systems Group provides an internet service portal for customers to order new equipment or services at any time.

Click here for an instant quote on a Fibernetics Business Telephone System.