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Bringing voice, video and data together remains a tough task
By Bronwen Roberts
CONVERGED COMMUNICATIONS is the Holy Grail for many companies in terms of telecommunications infrastructure. The ability to deliver all communications across a single network means that it can cut costs and reduce complexity.
A national communications provider will play aggressively. However, delivering an enterprise-level converged communications service has proved substantially tougher than the networking and telecoms vendors predicted when they began punting this idea in the late Nineties, early 2000s.
A true converged network involves putting all voice and data traffic across a single network, as well as running video and any other application without any loss of quality on any of the services. Fortunately, it's a concept that can be rolled out gradually and something that South African companies are already using to a greater or lesser degree.
Herman Singh, director of technology engineering at Standard Bank, says that by moving much of the company's internal traffic on to its data network has saved the company around R5m/year over the past five years, with that amount growing at roughly 20% a year.
"We initially connected our hubs in the major centres to head office in Johannesburg but have since added connections to our offshore operations in Swaziland, Namibia, Kenya, Zambia, Ghana, Britain, United States, Arab Emirates and Russia to the network.
"We had spare capacity on our data network - but that was part of a greater strategy to reduce out overall telecoms costs," says Singh. We now route about 130 000 interregional calls and voice traffic accounts for about 50% of the total on our data network."
That strategy is becoming commonplace among South Africa's large corporates, says Willem van Rensburg of Business Connexion. "However, when it comes to breaking out of their networks most of them are still using the traditional telephony system."
The traditional voice system is something that no corporate in its right mind is going to abandon in a hurry, because even once all the data streams have been moved across to one network, the phone system provides an efficient backup should anything go wrong.
The truth is that voice has become commoditised and the issue of connectivity is more important than the issue of providing voice services. However, when it comes to running a converged infrastructure there are a number of security concerns. Singh says that security is one of the issues preventing Standard Bank from breaking its voice traffic out onto the public network.
Van Rensburg says, that there's a move for - especially medium-sized companies - to increasingly outsource their networks to external service providers. That shifts the responsibility of maintaining the network's quality of service to them, as that's the critical factor. For companies that can't manage their own networks, outsourcing is essential to ensure that voice calls are clear, video doesn't break up and data delivery doesn't suffer at the expense of the traffic that requires real-time delivery.
About the Author
Storms national network gets you connected to colleagues, partners and suppliers reliably and securely while allowing for future expansion and easy integration of major technologies such as VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) and internet access. Bringing you the adaptation you require for getting up to speed with any innovation in data and voice technologies.
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