VOIP Solution and Service

With the advancement in VoIP, spam has also encroached from our e-mails into our VoIP voicemail. ‘Spam’ which was a very common thing for any e-mail user has now started perturbing the VoIP users as well.

‘Spam over Internet Telephony’ or SPIT is much more deadly than its e-mail cousin. E-mail spam can only degrade the service and clog up the bandwidth which in turn can delay your useful mails by a few minutes. However, the VoIP spam hits the VoIP gateways directly which degrades the voice quality, which is something very upsetting for the end user. The open nature of a VoIP phone call makes it easy for spammers to send audio-commercials to people’s VoIP voice-mail inboxes. VoIP is completely insecure at the protocol level; there is no encryption and authentication. People can easily hack a caller ID and claim to be whomever they want. And since VoIP services aren’t regulated, customers aren’t entitled to the same rights and protections as standard phone users, consumer groups get. Any open, IP-based phone system could be a target of “spitters.” That includes such services as Free World Dialup, SIP phone, and Earthlink’s Free Online Calling program. Other services, such as Skype and Vonage would be more immune to such attacks because portions of those networks operate over a closed system that the spitters would have to hack. However any network architecture is vulnerable to hacker attack, in fact Skype users were subjected to an unsolicited Voice Broadcast Message earlier in 2004 following which the company quickly patched the loophole within a couple of days. Hence, the VoIP industry is very well aware of the potential for SPIT and a number of companies are developing solutions to address it, it will be interesting to see the future developments in this field.

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Almost all of the VoIP providers provide Voicemail with the standard VoIP calling plan. The special feature of the VoIP voicemail plan is in how the consumer can access his/her VoIP voicemail message.

In general, there are 4 ways in which a VoIP consumer can access their voicemail. First of all, you can access your voicemail through your primary VoIP telephone by dialing *123 or some other combination of numbers (VoIP voicemail access code varies by provider). The automatic attendant will let you know how many voicemails you have and walk you through retrieving all of your new voicemails and saving/deleting your old emails. It is quite a slick system. The second method is via a local voicemail access number, where you can call a local telephone number from any telephone (Cell phone/Land line/ VoIP phone). When you dial into your local voicemail access number, the auto attendant will ask for you to punch in your VoIP phone number and password to be able to access your VoIP voicemail system. The third method is through your VoIP provider online account management portal. You can go to your Provider’s VoIP homepage and access the “Customer Login” portal by typing in your username and password. Once into the portal, click on the Voicemail tab and you can listen to your new voicemails over Internet connection. The fourth method, and possibly the most useful, is every time you get a new VoIP voicemail, you are sent an email. That email will state that you have a new voicemail from your VoIP account, the date the voicemail was received, and an attachment of the voicemail as a .wav file. One outstanding feature is that you can save the .wav file on your computer’s hard drive and email the voicemail to friends, family, or coworkers. Hence, when you add these four ways up, you will be able to access your voicemail from virtually anywhere.

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Businesses of all sizes are rapidly embracing IP Telephony or Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP). This next-generation technology joins disparate networks carrying voice, data and video traffic into a single unified network – enabling businesses to deploy new applications, increase productivity and lower operational costs.

Although VoIP promises to reduce complexity and cost by converging data and voice onto a single network, making the transition from a legacy proprietary-based system to IP is neither easy nor simple. Although there is much talk about voice as “just another application that rides over an IP environment,” voice is the most critical service that all businesses simply cannot do without. To enable the level of reliability and quality that voice requires, takes both experience and technical understanding of voice in a converged environment. Service providers such as Bellsouth bring experience in handling both voice and data. In addition, Bellsouth can help customers make the transition from TDM to IP, providing them with a bridge between VoIP and legacy systems. BellSouth VoIP provides a unique opportunity for businesses to converge voice traffic over a data infrastructure. By joining disparate networks carrying voice, data and video traffic into a single unified network, businesses can enable new applications, increase productivity and lower operational costs. BellSouth, teamed with Cisco and Nortel Networks, offers a choice of equipment-based IP solutions. It provides a customizable tool that allows businesses in all industries to gauge the financial and technical implications of convergence.

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One of the reasons VoIP is so successful and advantageous is it uses packet switching technology rather than circuit switching technology to provide phone services. Most phone companies use circuit switching technology. Packet switching technology is different in that it allows multiple phone calls to occur within the same space a single phone call would occupy using a circuit network.

This means less transmission time is used and less expense is incurred for the same phone call placed using packet switching versus circuit switching technology. How does packet switching work? Basically you pick up the receiver or initiate a phone call, which sends a signal. After dialing a phone number the tones are converted into digital data your computer can read and stored temporarily until the VoIP company sends the phone number you punch in to their call processor. The processor maps the phone number to an IP address. That is nothing more than someone’s computer address, then connects the two computers together using a soft switch device.

Your Computer and VoIP
Your computer is basically acting as an intermediary, passing voice messages much like it would an e-mail to another user. You can talk for any length of time necessary, and all the while your computer and VoIP software will be transmitting data packets of information from one computer to the other, translating analog information into digital virtually automatically. The entire process takes just seconds and allows a higher volume of calls than a traditional phone line would.