Firm Foundation Technology, LLC's Small Business Update
for Monday July 26th, 2004
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Headlines
Business Phone Calls over the Internet
More Internet Addresses on the Way
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Business Phone Calls over the Internet
Technology is supposed to make things better, especially for businesses. But the sad truth is many "latest things" either have little-to-no impact on small businesses or are total flops to begin with. One of the "next big things" currently competing for the attention of business owners and managers is "Voice over IP" or VoIP for short. VoIP is just a fancy name for being able to make telephone calls, virtually for free, over the Internet. The idea is nothing new at all. I can recall companies have offered software for making phone calls over the Internet for at least seven or eight years now.
But three major obstacles have hindered wide-scale business adoption of VoIP until now. The first two are related. The quality of the "connection" was poor to middling and unless you had broadband Internet access (meaning DSL, Cable modem or a T1 line) there was no real way to have multiple VoIP lines effectively in use anyway. Now that broadband Internet access is becoming more wide spread at higher and higher speeds for less and less cost the bandwidth needed to support multiple lines is available to even smaller businesses. The connection quality problem has been greatly improved by a combination of improved hardware, software and the greater available bandwidth.
The third obstacle was the lack of support by the major telecommunications companies. That has changed drastically over the last year. On the hardware and software side new standards to make sure that hardware from different vendors will work together have given manufactures like Cisco, 3Com and about 20 other vendors incentive to move ahead. Now VoIP has also caught the attention of the big traditional phone companies like AT&T, Verizon and MCI. AT&T and Verizon right now are marketing to mainly residential users but that will change soon (in 2005).
One last hurdle remains before VoIP becomes prevalent. Regulation reform. Both Congress and the FCC are looking hard at how exactly to define services like VoIP. At stake is by what rules and regulations are companies offering VoIP going to operate under and what rules will govern federal and state taxes on VoIP services. Stay tuned to see how this process turns out.
-- The Small Business Impact --
If your existing phone system does not support VoIP today, find out what the upgrade will cost. Be prepared and put some money in your 2005 budget to get or save up for the upgrade. By 2006 all the traditional phone companies will offer VoIP service to small businesses. VoIP services will also put pressure on companies like Verizon to improve their traditional package offerings as well.
Don't forget that there are other players to as well, VoIP only companies like Vonage and cable companies who offer Internet access are two examples.
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More Internet Addresses on the Way
This week the company that administers the computers that translate names like www.firmfoundationtechnology.com to their numerical addresses added some name servers that support IPv6 to the Internet. IPv6 is the next version of the networking protocol used to by computers to communicate over the Internet. The main benefit to IPv6 will be an incredible increase in the available unique address numbers that can be assigned to computing devices.
Right now the current standard, usually referred to as IPv4, supports about 4 billion unique addresses. The new standard supports over 300 trillion, trillion, trillion unique addresses. Under IPv6 there will also be a much simpler (from the computers standpoint) way to automatically configure its specific address. Also included is some long needed built in security protocols and some more flexibility in IPv6 to support new kinds of Internet traffic.
-- The Small Business Impact --
For right now the new IPv6 numbers are limited to Japan, Korea and next France. The current IPv4 system will probably be around in some form for at least 20 more years. Plenty of time to upgrade, plus virtually every computer operating system that has come out in the last 2-3 years already has at least limited support for IPv6 already.
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See you next week
Stan
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