The uptake of VOIP systems over the past few years has inflicted serious damage to the second-user telecommunications market. When clients wonder why I no longer want to buy their highly expensive PABX, I make it absolutely clear why:- the market is awash with late-model equipment looking for a home. Basic economics of supply and demand mean excess of supply means a fall in values. Can some equipment go lower than zero? Yes, sadly. We now charge to take most equipment away.

So, the new-generation equipment moves telecommunications into another, higher realm? Sadly not. Are my observations cynical and twisted, or wise? Sure, I have an “interest”, that of wanting my formerly buoyant trading activities to come back, but a few issues strike me that maybe the trade press, dependent on VOIP advertising revenue from manufacturers, tend to avoid:-

Voice quality. Sometimes it sounds like I’m calling someone from West Africa. And I swear that I’ve heard noises last heard when calling on the GPO in 1967. Supporters will reel out technical explanations about bandwidth, optimisation, but the net result is that irritating noises are back. Progress? Some VOIP champions claim that this is the price to pay for all the advantages. Voice communcation has its priorities in times of user-friendliness. The big clue is in the name. Voice…

The Dark Art Of Fault Tracing:- I observe, in talking to communcations managers, that some problems simply can’t be solved. Calls dropping, spontaneous conference calls, “wrong numbers”. The kind of problems which disappeared with crude electro-mechanical exchanges circa 1972. One major OEM told a Health Trust manager that the many faults were a mystery, and he would need to live with them as the cost of all the new technological advances. Eventually, the same chap happened to make contact with another user via a ‘net forum, and a fix was found which did not involve reinstallation of the 2000-point LAN, as was proposed at one point. I can’t recall such patience being exercised over the old equipment.

Star Wars Consoles. We collected a large consignment of analogue telephones from a local authority. They had “gone VOIP” and installed complex display ‘phones on the desk. How did these benefit the users? Well, they could only use 20% of the features on the old analogue telephones. But they could now see who was calling them. Did they do much calling off-site? No. “Why the change?” I asked. I lost eye-contact with the comms. manager at that point. Intellegence at the desktop assumes dedicated, technically-proficient users.

Features? What Features? We removed a large Siemens iSDX-L from a site that had “gone very VOIP”. The consultant involved with the change, a highly-experienced traditional voice specialist, related how he was horrified to find so many features that were an accepted part of the fifteen-year-old “legacy” PABX simply did not exist on the new kit. Nothing advanced, either. Call pick-up, multiple hunt groups, call forwarding. It pays to approach the equipment as a “voice router” rather than a private telephone exchange to avoid disappointment.

Steam and Clockwork Lasts. We are removing perfectly servicable equipment which has served organisations for over twenty years. Much of it was built to military/government specifications, in the days of The Cold War and The GPO. It chugs away, requiring very little mainentance. Will the latest server-based equipment still be around in 2021, based as it is on hardware that traces its ancestry back to IBM desktops.

Waste, Waste, Waste. I would love to conduct a survey among VOIP users to discover what they have actually gained from their new system. Meanwhile, thousands upon thousands of tonnes of perfectly servicable, non-life-expired equipment goes to its grave. Hardly eco-friendly.

More to follow. Much more, in fact. I don’t object to technology, but not “technology for it’s own sake”, pushing dubious benefits, delivering poorer quality, and wasting resources.

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 11th, 2006 at 9:51 am and is filed under Telecoms Recycling. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.