Australian celebrity Rove McManus and Telstra CEO Sol Trujillo were guests of honour at an event in Auckland recently, appearing on stage in front of several hundred ICT professionals at a function put on by Telstra’s kiwi subsidiary, TelstraClear.

The clever thing was neither Trujillo nor McManus were actually in Auckland. They both appeared as life-sized holograms, saving themselves the trouble of flying across the Tasman sea, and giving TelstraClear the opportunity to showcase what it called the first hologram demonstration of its type in New Zealand.

The gimmick helped launch a rebranding of what TelstraClear is now calling its ‘Next IP’ network across New Zealand – and it also served as a glimpse into the future of business communications.

Okay, it will be a while yet before hologram meetings become a reality, with flow-on effects such as making air travel an unnecessary legacy business activity. But think of the advances in video conferencing over the past few years and you start to get a feeling for what will probably be possible in a few years’ time.

Back to the present day and telcos – including TelstraClear and Telecom – are busy promoting the internet protocol (IP) transformation happening across their networks. They say IP allows organisations to take advantage of a lot more clever applications related to unified communications (UC) and business productivity.

At the hologram event, TelstraClear chief executive Allan Freeth said of the IP technology that had enabled it to happen: “It demonstrates the capability and capacity of our Next IP network and how business can be transformed in terms of efficiency and productivity.”

The IP fear factor
But are businesses holding back from embracing the technology’s potential because of fears – either real or unfounded – that if they want to go IP they need to do it over their own private networks rather than using the public internet option?

“We see less resistance because of that type of mentality now,” says Steve Woff, UC business manager at NEC.

He says while businesses previously worried about capacity constraints over the internet, that is now less of a concern for many.

“A while back everyone wanted to lease their lines – even before VoIP we were leasing lines to customers and they were doing their own traffic over them. Now everywhere bandwidth is starting to really expand at great rates, so there is a lot more bandwidth and a lot less fear of that.”

Woff says the popularity of consumer VoIP (voice-over-IP) services like Skype has also helped changed attitudes.

“A lot of the home-based technology, where people are using Skype or MSN to talk, has started to build confidence that you can actually have a conversation across the public internet and you can get good quality audio across it. So people are a little less sceptical now that they can actually use cheaper services, or in some cases free services, to run their calls for their business,” he says.

“Like all things you always have the choice, so you might decide to run your SIP-based calls across the internet for branch-to-branch, where it may not be so important, but for a critical customer you might force it out a TDM line or something else. Customers are always in control and they can make those choices themselves.”

Answering capacity concerns
While applications like Skype are fine as a consumer tool, they work as a shared resource. Business customers tend not to want to rely on pooled capacity when it comes to something as mission-critical to their operation as telephony.

The good news for businesses is that these days a growing number of telco providers are offering cheaper service options with quality of service commitments, so, for example, if a business knows it needs guaranteed capacity at any one time for, say 40 phone lines, that can be worked into an agreement with the provider.

Antonios Karantze, TelstraClear’s portfolio strategy manager, says the ability of telcos like TelstraClear to provide that level of guaranteed capacity is one of the strengths it brings to the market.

“For a business [user of IP services] it’s all about delivering services and density. Most people can deliver a single phone line service or a single broadband service because it’s a relatively low amount of work to use today’s access technologies,” he says.

“But for a business [with multiple phone lines], it changes the game in terms of what performance criteria you need to deliver services.

Otherwise you end up in a situation where it’s a ‘sometimes’ comms service. That’s the challenge with using public networks.

However, Chris Stewart, general manager of asnet Technologies, says as the quality of the public network infrastructure improves, it is becoming a better option for more businesses, depending on their size and requirements.

Stewart says asnet itself – with offices in Auckland, Papamoa and Wellington, as well as staff working from home – is an example of a business using the public internet for its communication needs. The company runs a fully managed VoIP network between its three offices and the home-based staff also use VoIP phones and virtual private network (VPN) clients for security.

“That’s pure internet. A lot of companies are now using the internet and VPN clients for that space,” he says.

“We have large internet pipes into our Auckland and Wellington offices and we can run 1- and 2mbps [videoconferencing] calls to the US and all around New Zealand and have zero packet loss for an hour online. That tells me that everyone’s infrastructure is getting better and better. We could not do that 12 or 18 months ago.”

Sweating the Wan asset
Outside of the telco’s infrastructure, organisations with wide area networks are, not surprisingly, interested in taking advantage of these private networks for voice and other types of communication, including video, where possible.

Roger Geerts, director of systems engineering at Juniper Networks, says security is an area the company focuses on a lot with customers. “Security seems to be an after-thought in many cases,” he says.

“But if you think about it up front and design your voice network using some of the virtualisation techniques that are available that can make your VoIP deployment very resilient, very secure, given that there are more and more VoIP attacks appearing on the horizon.”

A customer example cited by Juniper is De Bortoli Wines, which wanted to improve its WAN performance for voice and application traffic, including mission-critical ERP data, across a frame relay network connecting seven sites across Australia.

Most of De Bortoli’s facilities are located in rural areas, where terrestrial links are expensive and susceptible to latency problems. This meant that increasing bandwidth across the frame relay network was not only prohibitively expensive, it would also not necessarily improve the consistency and timely delivery of the company’s applications and voice traffic.

So instead De Bortoli deployed Juniper WAN optimisation equipment on its WAN links. This increased the company’s WAN capacity by more than 2.5 times on average, with a peak increase of more than 70 percent, ensuring consistent and accelerated performance for their ERP and voice applications.

This solution also allowed the company to avoid expensive and disruptive network upgrades. Based on estimated costs for the WAN link upgrades, De Bortoli will realise complete returns on their investment in less than nine months.

“It has meant that we will not have to upgrade our network for at least another two years,” says De Bortoli IT manager, Bill Robertson.

Beyond the hype
Meanwhile, NEC’s Woff says regardless of the type of network it is deployed over, VoIP is now a mature technology, and the evidence for that is in the fact that virtually every phone system sold today is IP-based.

“I think people are getting confidence from the fact that all the manufacturers are pushing these technologies,” Woff says.

“And they are reliable – we have phone systems out their running five-nines availability. Be they TDM or IP it doesn’t really matter – the actual call platforms now are considerably more reliable now than they were,” he says.

“The networks that people are embedding into their businesses are now much more reliable than they were. All these things added together are giving businesses confidence that they can run over VoIP – it’s not just the marketing hype that it was five years ago.”

Making a VoIP / Unified Communications investment decision this year?

Check out the 2009 iStart VoIP / Unified Communications Vendor Guide and the Unified Comms / VoIP / Conferencing Research Pavilion for exhibits, case studies, white papers and downloads from a range of New Zealand’s leading Unified Comms / VoIP / Conferencing vendors.

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By Simon Hendery