Tech Talk / By Martha Knight

In the past year I have been somewhat involved in several changes in telephony being considered and implemented by clients. Also, friends and family have acquired different phones and phone services.

For the “consumer” there are choices between landlines and Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), landlines and cell service, cell service while keeping a landline, digital phone through a cable TV provider, Ooma (or similar) through an Internet Service Provider (ISP), landlines with wireless rather than corded phones or both, Skype (or other online phone service), and so on. And should cell phones be smart phones with computer-like functions, or plain vanilla phones for phone calls and maybe a little texting? Should cell service be prepaid or contract?

Such decisions affect individuals and families, but can “scale up” a lot when it comes to large organizations. Our school system is wrestling with a major decision or package of decisions that may take months to make. I have seen a hospital, a largish enterprise and a government agency going through the decisions and arrangements, recently, and know it is anything but simple.

There are so many call transport and connectivity combinations! There are connectivity types and phone system types, and different ways of combining them.

This is a little like getting my music students to discover how many kinds of triads there are. Given that there are two sizes of thirds, Big and Little, and triads are formed by combining two thirds, how many ways can Big and Little thirds be combined?

We make Itsy-Bitsy Spider climbers with our hands, and illustrate. Big and Little (Major), Little and Big (Minor), Big and Big (Augmented), Little and Little (Diminished). Four ways! Four kinds of triads! (No, we are not going to discuss J.S. Bach tempering that THIRD third out of existence.)

But telephony is not so simple. Or it is as daunting as having to retune all the organs in all the great cathedrals, in order to play in 24 different tonalities at will.

There are traditional phone systems with calls traveling through regular old phone lines. There are also VoIP systems that use regular phone lines for transport. There are traditional phone systems that use IP for transport. There are VoIP systems that use IP connections for transport. To say nothing of the choice between your very own premises system and a hosted system. And don’t forget that VoIP connections are Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) trunks, except when they’re not.

There are upsides and downsides everywhere you look. An entity  might use IP transport so as to roll all its traffic (voice, data) into one ball, one contract, one provider and bill. As with a family getting cable, internet and TV from one provider, you might get a nice discount.

As for reliability, we consumers can understand that factor if we have experienced times when our internet service wasn’t working, and our power was out. A regular landline phone probably did work then. That transport is self-powered. It is likely to work even when cell phone service doesn’t and everything reliant on electrical power is comatose.

So, many larger users of telephony like to keep some traditional phones around, connected to traditional transport. Not only are there those instances when power is out, there are times when the ISP is out of service too.

Those entities that have backup generators are in good shape to deal with power outages, but with the ISP crash, not so much.

If you have a VoIP premises system but use traditional transport, using a Wide Area Network (WAN) for some calls could still bring some savings on calls between offices or WAN clients.

What about faxing? Some of us never fax. Some of us do only once in a great while, and some enterprises send and receive faxes by the bushel. I find that I have fewer and fewer occasions to fax. Sending and receiving legal documents, sharing other kinds of documents with lists of recipients, sending stories to newspapers, it works just fine to attach Word and Excel files to emails. That’s how I receive most documents, too. Faxes are like copies or photos of documents, but email attachments can be “live” documents.

Those entities that still need the ability to fax may find that fax transmissions over IP are problematic, so regular landlines may still be needed for the best fax service. Of course, in a power outage, forget it—unless there’s a generator handy. Fax machines need some juice.

It will be interesting to see how the school system sorts and sifts its way to the best solution for meeting its telephony needs. There may be as many different solutions as there are vendors who market to them. Consultants can have their biases, and their “vendor relationships,” too.

McKean County has gone through many changes in its telephony in the past decade or two. There was a major upheaval during the Stratton-Weaver-Beck years, and there have been a few since. Area school systems have gone through their changes too.. Municipalities have their telephony and data transmission needs. I have watched with amusement the antics of some “consultants” who claim to be independent but actually work for one vendor. There are gotchas at every hand.

Whoever said talk is cheap was not dealing with modern phone service.