The stated benefit of a full VoIP network, covering office and mobile phones, is being able to keep a single number for all contacts, and not having to worry about diverting numbers or paying telecom providers twice for the one phone call. The unstated benefit is our employees will always be in reach, whether at night, on the weekend or on leave. They could turn their phone off, but who can resist the temptation of checking mail and missed calls every couple of hours when they've got themselves a new smartphone?

Business is not the only group making the move to VoIP. Hackers have been quick to port their instant messaging-based attacks to VoIP software. So far, VoIP systems have been attacked by worms, viruses and floods. It only needs to suffer from boils and death of the first-born, and we're revisiting the Plagues of Egypt. Cisco has responded with software patches for its VoIP servers to prevent flood attacks through its ports, as floods in ports can lead to storms in T-Cups (The Cisco Unified Presence Server).

Since anything to do with communications inevitably gets back to cabling, it shouldn't have come as any surprise that our Cat 3 cables needed upgrading. Apparently Cat 3 is so named because voice calls over it generate so much hiss it sounds like three cats fighting. My team told me we need Cat 5e or 6. When I suggested we should skip ahead to Cat 8 and future-proof the installation, everyone just stared at me. I may have pre-empted the standards bodies.

The Price of Acronyms

After the VoIP PBX arrived to replace our old PABX, I realized why the middle A has been made redundant. It stood for Automatic, which a VoIP PBX most definitely isn't. Configuring commercial VoIP systems is still a black art, and the company from whom I bought my VoIP service offered no help at all. I complained to the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman, only to discover my VoIP provider, like around a third of all providers, hadn't signed up to the industry's regulatory framework.

I tried to call in experts to fix my phone system, but my phone wasn't working to call them. After a lot of trial and error, experimentation and error, and just errors, I took the unprecedented step of reading the manual. That fixed the phones but I still couldn't get the fax machines working. I just left them on the analog lines and hoped no one would notice, which I discovered later at a VoIP conference is what everyone else had done.

Since implementation, users have complained that the new phone system suffers long latencies and frequently drops out, so they're resorting to using their mobile phones in the office instead. Although that means my costs will reduce, since mobile calls don't come from my budget, I still feel the need to offer a solution.

I've promised them that, in our second phase of roll-out, we'll implement a new technology called QoS. I'm not sure how it works, but I've read that companies who delivered QoS with their VoIP network have much better service. Apparently, I can "improve the QoS with MOS SLA from ITU". What a triumph for TLAs. Translating that sentence into English; Quality of Service is improved with a Mean Opinion Score (why not have a Kind Opinion Score) of a Service Level Agreement from the International Telecommunications Union. Nope, no clearer.

The current development in this technology is VoIPOMN (Voice Over Internet Protocol Over Mobile Networks). Adding those extra acronyms comes at a cost. Currently, the key benefit of VoIP calls is they're free. A key feature of mobile phones is they're expensive and the cost of an always-on mobile phone call will test any provider's monthly caps.