Subscribe to the Free Print Edition!
Celebrating 25 Years

GCN Home > 03/22/04 issue

Best in show & enterprise systems software: Qovia helps make VOIP systems ring true

By Richard W. Walker, GCN Staff

Bill Miller, desktop services manager for Nevada County, Calif., is a believer in voice over IP. The efficiencies of combining voice and data networks make it a logical choice for almost anyone faced with changing out an aging telephone system, he said. “I just can’t see any reason for doing anything else, except for the fear factor.”

The choice was not so clear in 1998, when Miller faced the prospect of updating the phone system in Nevada County, which covers 978 square miles in the Sierra Nevada. The county’s four Saturn 2E phone switches from Siemens Corp. of New York were aging.

At $50,000 a year, “maintenance was becoming too much,” he said. “The people able to perform the maintenance were aging, too, and retiring. I was in a dilemma.”

It would cost from $1.5 million to $2 million to replace the system with something similar, or the county could wait for something better.

“I had heard about voice over IP,” Miller said. “I kept my eye on that.” He talked to vendors, followed R&D in the field and patched up his aging switches while waiting for the new technology to mature. “It was an uneasy feeling.”

He began rolling out VOIP to the county’s 1,200 employees in 2000, installing MBX Superstack 5000 IP private branch exchanges from 3Com Corp. of Santa Clara, Calif. It worked, but it was touch and go for a while.

“It took about six months to get that thing going to where it hummed,” Miller said. It was a rocky six months. “I was only two weeks away from having to scrap that whole thing because of the voice quality.”

In the end, improving voice quality was a matter of fine-tuning the network rather than fixing anything that was broken. The key to making VOIP work, Miller found, is “infrastructure, infrastructure, infrastructure.”

One person’s problem is another’s opportunity. The founders of Qovia Inc. of Frederick, Md., identified VOIP voice quality as an attractive niche when searching for a product to develop in 2002.

“It hit us that monitoring and management would logically follow the deployment of voice networks,” said Pierce Reid, Qovia’s vice president of marketing. In 2002, Qovia’s founders began talking with people who already were using VOIP, including Nevada County’s Miller, to develop requirements for a new product. The result is a suite of monitoring and management tools tailored for voice networks that give administrators a way other than customer complaints for addressing voice quality.

More news on related topics: Product Reviews, Products Central



GCN Popup