No more phone lines… almost there
As a software/data guy I always dream of abolishing physical boundaries so everything can be in software, virtualized. Besides a computer and a place to sit, what do you need to work?
- power
- network connection
- telephone connection
Power is ubiquotous, and with the advent of Wifi a network connection is starting to become so as well. Although everyone has mobile phones these days, as a company you still need a local phone number connected to a PBX so that:
- the company has one number people call
- people inside the company can call each other for free
VoIP has the promise to bring phone connectivity through the Internet. To do so as a company you’ll need:
- VoIP (aka SIP) phones, software phones are available from many places, e.g., XTen and Gizmo
- a VoIP PBX, an open source solution is Asterisk
- a way for us to call other people (out-bound dialing)
- a way for people to call us (in-bound dailing, aka DID, Direct Inward Dialing)
The first two are no-brainers (although not easy enough to set up), the tricky part is connecting to the telephone network. When I was looking two years ago there were no DID players in mainland China.
Out-bound calling was possible, but if the VoIP network you use route through North America or Europe the network quality won’t be good enough for business use… I couldn’t find anyone with good enough quality for company use.
You could only get in-bound phone numbers from the US, UK, and HK, and we can’t very well ask our local business partners and clients to call a US number to reach us. (Telephone networks are in general protected monopolies scared shitless of losing their voice business, their cash cow, so it’s no surprise they’re fighting VoIP wherever they can.)
You could, using FSO cards or modems, set up your own phone system to VoIP gateway. I’ve had so much trouble with modems and the phone network before, so I would avoid this if at all possible. (You’ve either got the curse of being in “analog land” or the curse of a million different signaling protocols in the case of ISDN.)
A promotional email from Gizmo made me aware of DID availability in China, in particular for Shanghai (+86 21) and Weifang (+86 536) areas. Gizmo probably doesn’t provide this themselves, so I went looking for their partner on the VoIP service provider list on voip-info. I couldn’t, but I found the same service available cheaper from DID World-Wide. Unfortunately I haven’t found any providers in Beijing yet. When there are, we’ll finally be able to virtualize this part of the company and bury those unreliable and unwieldy network cables once and for all.