Taking charge of your VoIP project

Quite a while ago it was discovered that sending signals over great distances was much easier and cost-effective if done in a digital fashion: first the data would be digitized with an ADC (analog to digital converter) then transformed back to analog at the destination using a DAC (digital to analogue converter), making telephony a bit more reliable.

Book Title:	Taking charge of your VoIP Project
Author:	John Q. Walker & Jeffrey T. Hicks
Publication:	Cisco Press Mar 2004
ISBN:	1587200929

Entitled Voice over Internet Protocol, the new VoIP aims to transfer voice data over the already established Internet infrastructure, digitizing voice in data packets, sending them and reconverting at the destination. Digital format is easier to manipulate than analog: it can be routed and otherwise transported over the Internet, compressed, encrypted and is more tolerant to noise than analogue. VoIP enables conferencing, secure communication and discussion enhancement by real time exchange of data.

The problems arise when trying to integrate current VoIP architecture with the Internet infrastructure. Routers get the data packets where they need to, but time isn’t always a concern. For voice communication to work, the process must be real-time, which is difficult to attain with today’s means of routing and transporting data; the technology is fairly new however, and there is room for improvement.

The book Taking Charge Of Your VoIP Project is a great approach to starting your way in the world of VoIP specialists. As the technology is not yet widely deployed, and skilled technicians are rare, the move to VoIP might seem not worth the risks. Structured in eight chapters, the book has that seldom found feel of great knowledge without the dryness of a typical technical manual, benefiting from the two authors’ years of experience in the field.
Chapter One, “Voice basics” offers much needed entry-level information about both the Data and Telephony networks making you want to read just out of desire to learn more, if not anything else.

Chapter Two, “Building a Business Case for VoIP” offers a project-oriented approach to recapitulating the advantages and disadvantages of deploying a VoIP solution for your business. The next chapters, “Planning for VoIP” and “Do It Yourself” are all about that: all the questions you need to ask yourself (and your provider) about your business requirements and network possibilities in relation to VoIP deployment.

Chapters Five and Six, “Quality of Service and Tuning” and “Ongoing VoIP Management” are more technically oriented. The first has quite a bit of detail, as QoS requires in-depth knowledge of the existing data network, and the second deals with such topics as staff training and performance measuring concepts that need to be considered when deploying a VoIP solution.

Chapter Seven, “Establishing VoIP SLAs” is all about service levels, dealing with everything you need to know when negotiating with your provider or keeping your network up and running; Chapter Eight, “VoIP Security” outlines procedures for prevention, detection and reaction to various possible security-related problems inherent to managing a network.

All in all, the book is a good starting point for both IT executives to help in their decision making, and network (Data and Telephony) professionals, providing pertinent, in-detail information about technologies in use today and ways to use them profitably.