Can your grandmother run this IP network?

In the realm of consumer telephony and Internet services, broadband providers have taken years to make their offerings what some people would call "grandma quality."

What that means is whether the service is completely transparent to the end-user, in the user's own behavioral terms. Comcast, in particular, has strived to improve its triple-play service combining television, Internet and telephone service -- a key for them because their identity is rooted in cable TV. For consumers, the telephony part of Comcast's service involves plugging a telephone into a RJ-11 jack, just as they've done for decades.

Now, presumably you don't need network services at your company to be grandma-quality for you to work with them. Or do you? You might be surprised.

Determining whether a service is ready for corporate use and profitable to employ is often a question of whether all costs have been accounted for. And believe it or not, Grandma might actually have something useful to say about this, because many of those very costs directly relate to the ease-of-use "she" demands.

Here's an example. Recently I went to Orlando for the VoiceCon conference, where I moderated a panel on "SIP Trunking." What's that? Well, "SIP" refers to the Session Initiation Protocol, which is a set of IETF standards that handles call set-up and signaling using VoIP, and is supplanting the heavier H.323 standard for packet voice traffic that came out of ITU, the older telecom standards group. SIP Trunking, by extension, is a method by which trunks connecting the IP PBX to the network (in this case, an IP wide-area network) can natively use the SIP protocol to provide a real telephony "feel" to the call, and the opportunity to transparently use call-routing features initiated by either the voice switch or the end-user.

For veteran telecom hands, think of it as the VoIP equivalent of an ISDN Primary Rate Interface and you'll get the idea. As a matter of fact, one of the principal hopes for this technology is that businesses will be able to combine SIP trunks with business VoIP packages priced by the "concurrent call" plus dynamic bandwidth allocation across the WAN to limit the number of such concurrent calls they have to buy. In theory, this should dramatically lower the costs that are now associated with PRIs and tolls on nailed-up circuits bought by the DS-0 and engineered for the busy hour.

So, does it work? To be certain, each key vendor involved in SIP Trunking basically has to test its service against the diverse set of IP PBXs and IP-enabled premises voice switches that corporations typically have. That's because implementations of the control and signaling protocols have varied, from Cisco and its Call Manager products on down to the traditional voice manufacturers (including Nortel, still big in the PBX world despite its Chapter 11 filing).

At VoiceCon, the AT&T and Verizon product managers on my panel talked of testing all this equipment in their labs against their SIP Trunking services. By contrast, one of the equipment vendors, Alan Percy of AudioCodes, described his company's Mediant line of media gateways (another box for the customer edge) that guarantees such interoperability between PBXs (even legacy TDM PBXs) and provider networks via SIP Trunking.

Which kind of testing -- the carrier's or the equipment vendor's -- should a customer trust to make sure the service works in all scenarios? Well, some customers are now doing their own testing to find that out. They want to determine whether they can simply buy SIP Trunking from a big carrier, or whether they must add their own functionality through additional equipment. Basically, they want to see whether they have all of the elements in place that would make an application based on SIP trunking -- especially anything related to a distributed call center that could even include individual agent end-points -- completely transparent before they go live.

Along with user transparency comes the need to make sure there are no hidden costs. Once again, that's true for you as the network professional as well as the end-users. You don't want to find out that "batteries are sold separately" any more than they do.

At TC2 we judge that through our Total Cost of Ownership models for procurements and offer evaluations. Just as on any traditional deal we want to know what all the credits and surcharges are before we judge any given rate element such as a per-minute toll or a monthly port charge, on a next-generation deal we want to know what all the costs are that you will incur until the service becomes usable rather than theoretical.

So it turns out that the question of whether something is "grandma-quality" is actually a very sophisticated measure, not something simplistic at all. Part of it is a test of whether you've baked in every cost that you will actually face. Many of those costs are precisely the ones that might have to be incurred to make the service transparent to end-users.

Interest in SIP Trunking is very high -- I've actually run three panels on this topic for VoiceCon in the last year and a half, and attendance has grown exponentially each time -- but large users are only just starting to seriously solicit real proposals for this. That's a common pattern for important, customer-facing technologies, and helps explain why it takes several years for network ideas to be deemed a success or failure.

Given the relative stasis in PRI pricing, cost savings from SIP Trunking could be very significant, but the grandma-quality test will come into play on both functionality and TCO before we know for sure. Let me know if you decide to explore this, and we will keep you informed and updated.