What is the most formidable impediment to business success with IP telephony?

I'd say the biggest challenge is managing the knowledge and risk level. With the bandwidth capabilities available at such low prices, small businesses can actually save money and use their business class cable or fiber data connections to service voice and data quite well and pretty darn inexpensively.

But, this decision has to be taken on the knowledge that there are more risks using VoIP than POTS, simply due to the complexity. If the stakeholders understand and accept this, then a modest investment can yield a phone system much more feature rich and capable than the current key and patchwork phone systems many small businesses have.

Once you move to larger (8 lines +) systems and environments, you do need management of both the infrastructure and fault tolerance levels that can be achieved, and it is not as much about savings any more as it is creating new features and benefits for the employee and the customer.

There are many options to manage this risk, from having providers with failover capabilities to ring cell or other communication devices all the way to installing UPSes, generators and backup data circuits using BGP. But, most important is understanding the level of risk in your particular environment, and equating that to your business' level of tolerance of that risk. Often times I find that adding another "9" to the service level is not as necessary as one may believe when you add all the factors together.

Making sure all stakeholders and users are on board with the service, the risk and the disaster recovery model goes a long way.

The biggest challenge with IP telephony is the "up-skilling" necessary for IT organizations that had traditionally left the communications infrastructure and applications to the telecom group. As IP telephony is now basically another application (albeit a complex and mission-critical one) IT infrastructure and applications specialists have to add "voice" to their bag of tricks. Managing mission critical voice applications in business is not a trivial exercise. No blue screens and reboots are tolerated when people are using their phones (especially if they happen to be talking to a customer!)

Recently AT&T reached out to the FCC to stop supporting and selling PSTN. They are going to focus on Broadband and VoIP products. It is inevdiable IP telephony is here to stay and growing in leaps and bounds. One challenge that arises is you are now relying completely on your internet circuit. Another challenge I have witnessed is if the main hub goes down then all locations are down. There is however a product out there that has been designed to overcome these challenges and add disaster recovery to your phone system. Nick and Michael I think you would be impressed as well in fact all of the IT pros that have seen this are impressed. Contact me for more details bhenderson@teleco-ilm.comwww.teleco-ilm.com

I believe, the biggest impediment to a successful rollout of IP Telephony is the same impediment to rolling out successful TDM applicatons and that is "THE LAST MILE", Where the last mile in IP is the Internet provider, and the last mile in TDM is the customer's LEC connections. By rolling out IP, in most cases, you still have the traditional last mile but you also add in the additional potential point of failure which is the broadband connection/provider riding over that traditional last mile.

If the Broadband privder is not solid, your risk of a less than successful IP transition is going to be much higher. If a customer tells me their provider of IP is up and down I see red flags all over and will immediately want to begin considering bringing in a different provider. (assuming the up and down issues are not related to the LEC or CLEC).

Sometimes this impediment is too difficult to overcome. If the point of failure is in fact a LEC issue and there are no other options, it may not be possible to get around it unless you use drastic measures such as wireless IP or Sattelite etc. whihc have their own issues to be dealt with.

We had one application where the customer's entry point to the building from the LEC flooded annually. This caused the service to go up and down signficantly during winter. The LEC refused to move the entry point unless the customer paid significant charges to make it happen. In this case, the customer made the decision to stay with what they had as the IP was not mission critical. If they put all Voice and Data over it, it would then be mission critical and they were not comfortable with that. I completely concur!

Hope you find this of some value.

It's not being able to manage real-time information on the network. Once the network is built properly, the customer doesn't have to worry about which applications are real-time and which are not. The impediment is having the technical expertise available to set up the a proper network with QoS. Private LANs and WANs are regularly set up for QoS with engineers who have the proper training/experience. VoIP over the Internet is another story. QoS can't be acheived on this public network. If this could somehow be overcome, VoIP would quickly change telecom as an industry.

Bottom line, it's whether or not QoS (Quality of Service) is implemented on the Network. Internet VoIP will never be solid without QoS.

Read more about QoS and VoIP here...

http://myphonescout.com/?p=179

This article may give you some insight.

I read this a little differently in terms of what is being asked. Although I agree infrastructure, QOS and getting IT support "voice savvy", are all valid technical hurdles,the biggest impediment is getting management (from CEO to IT Manager) to buy into the VoIP concept. Since this is NEW technology (to them), it is taking them outside their comfort zones. Most executives I talk to have heard all the horror stories from poor quality over MagicJ ack or Skype or....... and do not want to risk their business for low service. Getting upper management educated on the reliability and advantages, not to mention cost savings, of VoIP is key to overcoming their reluctance.

Your question does not explain the whose perspective vis-a-vis "business success". As one can tell from the diverse answers, there are several business success issues if you simply look at the perspectives in the IP telephony food chain. For example, some answered from the enterprise (I use this loosely, including SoHo to large multi-campus businesses) perspectives. Others answer from the common carrier perspective. And finally, there are the various "intermediaries' perspectives" -- I call them that because they are between the common carrier and the enterprise and include the hosted services and IP PBX vendors. Each of these categories and sub categories have unique challenges/impediments to achieve their own business success.

Having said all that, one of the biggest impediments to IP telephony success is too much hype by individuals who claim to be experts but have had only the slightest taste of reality when it comes to designing, implementing and maintaining (horrors! I have to live with the ramifications of my punditry and recommendations????) any IP telephony system in any of the above (sub)categories.

I see many technical answers posted to a business question. Business success will hinge on the integrator and technical staff's ability to discover how the end user uses telephony, and what is important to them and what may need to be improved with the roll-out of an IP based platform. Once that baseline is established, it is incumbent on them to choose the proper platform deployed on a business quality LAN/WAN that best matches that business need, (mobility, work at home users, security, recording, video or audio conferencing, etc.). The third leg in this stool is comprehensive user training that is specific to their business requirement. The executive admin may care less about mobility features, but need to know how to juggle 6 incoming calls from the press and help the helpless senior exec with a conference call. The road warrior sales manager will need to know how to access voice mails in his Outlook, hold an impromptu 6 way conference call, and monitor the presence of his 12 man sales team. This level of investigation, design, implementation, and training is the true test of an integrator worth their salt. These are the factors that will determine success or failure of a technology migration. Look for the firm that has been there; done that.