Cheapest Solution VoIP: Service providers and their business customers are both eager to reap the benefits of VoIP and convergence. Service providers want to capture new customers, reduce operational costs and deliver new revenue- and profit-driving offerings - such as IP Centrex and presence-enabled conferencing.

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How Quintum's Access Solutions Bring Service Providers and Enterprises Together to Make the World Safe for VoIP

ISSUES AT THE EDGE:

Where the service provider networkmeets the enterprise.

Service providers and their business customers are both eager to reap the benefits of VoIP and convergence. Service providers want to capture new customers, reduce operational costs and deliver new revenue- and profit-driving offerings - such as IP Centrex and presence-enabled conferencing. Business customers are seeking reduced costs, simplified management, and the ability to implement those new service provider offerings.

Despite these common interests, however, service providers and their customers have not been able to move forward with their convergence plans as quickly as either of them would like. That's because they face a variety of nagging issues as they try to interface their networks. These issues include:

Compatibility and ease of installation
Service providers typically maintain highly standardized environments in order to keep operating costs low and optimize economies of scale. Their customers, on the other hand, have an extremely diverse range of equipment and configurations. This creates a fundamental conflict. Service providers can't afford to perform a lot of highly customized "one-off" installations. They want to have a simple, uniform way to connect their customers' networks to their own. Business customers, on the other hand, want their service provider to fully support their entire existing environments - whether they include traditional PBXs, IP PBXs, and/or analog devices such as fax machines or facilities management systems that use built-in modems to provide centralized monitoring capabilities.

In other words, service providers need the network-to-network interface to be very easy to deploy. But, because of the diversity of the enterprise environments they have to plug into, they historically have not been able to achieve this goal.

Survivability/reliability
Business users depend on voice service every minute of the day. So they are reasonably reticent about moving forward with any solution that doesn't promise rock-solid reliability. Service providers want to fulfill this requirement, because they know that reliable service is essential for customer retention and strong brand identity. The problem is that the interface between their respective networks potentially represents a single point-of-failure. This creates both a real risk of service interruption and a heightened perception of potential risk. Both service providers and business customers need a way to mitigate or even eliminate this risk factor.

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