Creating a secure and reliable VoIP solution

If you're considering a switch to VoIP, you may be wondering about security and reliability issues. You know VoIP uses the internet (in most cases) to transmit calls, and internet security breaches are featured in the news almost daily. Perhaps the biggest challenge to building a secure VoIP infrastructure, however, is the trade-off you must often make between security and performance. This trade-off exists on data networks, too, but it presents more of an issue on voice networks because quality of service is so dependent on performance. Let's take a look at the problem and some things you can do to work around it.

How to make VoIP more reliable

The phone company has a reputation for reliability: customers are used to getting a dialling tone every time they pick up the phone; they're used to calls going through to the correct party; and they're used to clear communications on that call until one of the parties terminates it. They aren't willing to settle for less.

The trouble with VoIP

Many businesses tried VoIP when it first became available; they didn't cancel their PSTN service and embrace IP telephony because they didn't find VoIP to be entirely trustworthy. The service worked great — sometimes. Other times, users would pick up the phone to find there was no dialling tone, and would have to reboot the VoIP box before making or receiving a call. Sometimes calls went through with no problem, but calls to certain phone numbers, especially those on corporate PBX systems, resulted in so much echo that users had to switch to the landline when talking to those people. Other weird problems would occasionally pop up, such as caller ID reporting a totally different number than the one from which the call was made. The overall consensus was: VoIP had great potential, but, like beta software with cool features, it's just a little too flaky for everyday use. In fact, the complaints about VoIP quality — poor sound, dropped calls and intermittent loss of service — are the same ones that plagued mobile-phone technology in its early days and, indeed, the same ones that occurred with PSTN when the whole phone system was in its infancy. That should give us hope that, as VoIP matures, these problems will become rarer... more>>>