"At first we weren't sure VoIP was mature enough to use in a large production environment," says Sean Burke, director of network operations for GSW, which after a series of acquisitions in the past two years has grown from 70 employees to nearly 500. What finally sold GSW on IP voice were some next-generation applications for VoIP, such as the combination of voice and e-mail, and a PC-phone interface that lets you dial from your PC. GSW is testing these tools from Cisco Systems, its VoIP supplier. "It's convenient to be able to right-click on Outlook, select 'call contact' and have the phone come up on speaker and dial automatically," Burke says.
Another advantage of VoIP is its ability to handle moves, adds and changes. "You just unplug an IP phone from one office and plug it into another live network jack," Burke says. That's a far cry from traditional telephony, where you have to punch down wiring and reconfigure the PBX when an extension is moved or added.
GSW runs Cisco's Call Manager, a Microsoft Windows 2000-based application, and more than 500 Cisco 7960 IP phones in its headquarters, on a Gigabit Ethernet LAN of mostly Cisco switches and routers. Long-distance voice traffic from Columbus to its remote sites is sent as VoIP over the frame relay WAN. The calls then are off-loaded to GSW's Mitel analog PBXes: The remote sites don't use VoIP locally, but most of those PBXes will be replaced with Call Manager servers eventually.
Burke says the digital voice quality is better than that of its traditional analog PBX traffic, and the new phone system cost about $300,000 plus another $270,000 for the gigabit LAN. Still, VoIP wasn't exactly plug and play. "There's a learning curve with the technology," Burke says. "You have to be willing to tackle it or find a good integrator to work with you on it."
One of the biggest challenges for GSW is setting the QoS (Quality of Service) parameters to ensure its voice traffic gets priority on the network. Although the fat gigabit pipe practically guarantees plenty of bandwidth by default, GSW still is configuring the routers manually (until it gets Cisco's QoS Policy Manager) with Cisco's priority-queuing feature, which gives voice priority at all times. That ensures a clear voice call at headquarters and that voice gets the most room on the more bandwidth-constrained WAN pipe.
Early on, GSW ran into trouble when its Cisco gateway started to lose the IP phones' MAC (Media Access Control) addresses, which meant the IP phones could send voice to the gateway, but the gateway couldn't "find" the phones, so the conversation was one-way. A software fix from Cisco remedied the problem, according to Burke.
Next for GSW is a virtual IP office for its users, especially the company's pharmaceutical consultants, who travel to client sites. Burke is testing an at-home VPN connection with a SOHO router and an IP phone. "We will be deploying it this way for the consultants, but it would be nice to have the phone connect to the VPN on its own," which would eliminate the SOHO router, he says. That would require a VPN client package on the IP phone so you could plug the phone into an Internet connection to get an immediate VPN session to the office. GSW also is testing Cisco's new SoftPhone, a PC-based virtual phone application that would replace both the SOHO router and the IP phone.
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