Page 21 - Telecom Reseller March-April 2017

Telecom Reseller 21
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March/April 2017
To VoIP or not to VoIP−is that the question? Part 2
RUFFIN
by Phil Ruffin
Why is it people want to take a perfectly good telephone system and completely change the way it works? Voice telephone systems as a whole are extremely reliable. What good can come of “vaporizing” it to push the service out onto the “ether?”
To begin with, let’s start with a quick look at your old home phone. If you’re old enough to remember a telephone plugged into the wall
of your home that the family shared, think through this with me. As a user of the phone, a big attraction is that it was always there. Even when no one was on the phone (which, unless you had teenagers, was most of the time), the phone service was there. Any time you wanted you could pick up the handset and hear dial tone. Possibly its biggest advantage was that it was always standing by, waiting for someone to make a call. e wires connected directly to a port on a local telephone system and were dedicated to your family and no one else. You could use it or not, but your phone bill paid for that consistent availability just as much as for the calls you made.
e same thing was true for your place of business up through the 1970s. In the 1980s it became common for businesses to get their own phone systems. In a way, they became a private phone company for themselves, providing a desk phone that was basically the same as your home phone. e phone sat there at your desk, just like your home phone, with a hardware port and wires that sat unused until you made a call.
ALONG CAME COMPANY NETWORKS AND THE INTERNET. When companies committed to using networks as an integral part of business communication, they also committed to new, expensive wiring for their buildings. It took several years for that wiring to standardize, but it became common to see network and voice wiring to every desk and along the walls where anything might need to plug in.
NOW WE NEED TO LOOK INSIDE THOSE JACKS TO SEE WHAT’S ACTUALLY GOING ON.
First let’s analyze what really happens on the voice wires. By this time, your company has converted to a digital phone system with (mostly) 2-wire digital phones at each desk. Most of the time there’s a DC voltage across those two wires, but nothing else. When the phone rings or when you make a call, there is some data exchange across the wires, but if you look carefully, you can see long spaces in the conversation when nothing is happening. Even a busy conversation has short periods of silence between words and sentences. ose periods of silence are important to the communication, but they are still times when the wiring is not being utilized.
NOW LET’S LOOK AT THE DATA WIRING.
Your company probably uses Ethernet with two transmit wires, two receive wires, and two used for power. ere is frequent movement of data across the transmit and receive wires, whether or not any actual data is needed.
RUFFIN continuesonpage 23 ››