The internet connections are becoming faster and faster. As a result of that, more and more bandwidth is not used all the time. This bandwidth can then be used for different applications, e.g. Internet Telephony, or better: Voice over IP (VoIP).

At first glance, VoIP can only be a winner: 

• It reduces your telephone costs. Expensive international calls can be avoided, but also the bulk of the local calls. 
• It reduces the cost of your customers that are on hold. Even if it takes 30 minutes, which of course does not happen within your organization, customers can not complain about the telephone fee they have to pay for waiting. 
• It increases the possibilities for e.g. conference-calls can now be accompanied by streaming video. 
• It reduces costs as expensive telephone centrals become obsolete 
• You will be reachable anywhere in the world where there is internet as you take your Internet Telephone Number (ITN) with you.

Other positive points that make VoIP a winner can be argued.

So should we all switch to VoIP and leave the old fashioned telephone companies? That depends on the situation. Usually you will only hear about positive side of VoIP. Norman will bring it on you to list some of the negative sides.

As VoIP is heavily depending on the internet (TCP/IP) it is rather sensible towards the bandwidth provided. Nowadays it is far from imaginable that a company is the victim of a Distributed Denial of Service attack (DDoS) where internet-communication between the company and the outside world is hardly possible or not possible at all. If this company would rely on VoIP, they will be unable to establish any dialogue with 3rd parties. Even in the event that the 3rd party is reachable, the DDoS will use so much bandwidth that the stream used to carry the spoken words will not have space enough. A normal conversation will therefore be impossible, a situation no company would like to find themselves in as no communication often means no money, hence no earnings.

Another issue arising with VoIP is the migration of spam. As spam is blocked more and more efficiently on the e-mail gateways, the spammers try different ways of ‘selling’ their attributes. While sending a batch of one million e-mails might almost be free, calling one million people their regular phone is expensive and only lucrative for the telecom companies. And, calling a company, you usually end up with the telephone-reception who refuses to connect you to the right person. It is also much cheaper, if not free, when spammers use VoIP as a medium. It is also rather convenient as once spammers have someone’s ITN, you will be able to reach these people wherever they are in the world. Of course they should be online, but that is an easy check. It may mean that you will be busy answering more and more spam-calls than real calls. This means that techniques have to be invented that will separate the legitimate calls from the spam calls and thus we are back in the same situation as e-mail.

A third problem is spying. With VoIP you will wear a headset with an earphone and a microphone. Either through USB or Bluetooth, the headset is connected to your computer, where the voice is digitized and transmitted. Although most of the VoIP Service Providers offer point to point encryption, it is well possible that a malicious agent has been placed on your computer that will also send out a non-encrypted stream to someone else. Your confidential business information therefore might be on the street. Big brother is then not watching you but hearing you!!! The only possible way to solve this problem is to have the encryption and decryption as close to the point of origin/destination as possible, which means in the microphone and the earphone (hardware encryption/decryption).

We’ve just pointed out three unique but highly likely problems with VoIP. There are many more problems. Of course any way of communication has its unique set of problems. However, it seems that the more technically advanced the communciation channel gets, the more problem arise and the more open and visible the communication will be. Is this a reason to abandon VoIP completely? That is not our call, but we would say “No" to that. We just pictured some of the circumstances you have to realize when using VoIP. Like with any other kind of communication, you will have to be sensible when to use VoIP and when not, and when to say something and when not.

VoIP will become more and more popular and it is just a matter of time before the bad guys will find exploits or will write malicious code to hook into the system. Norman is paying a close watch to this situation and of course will inform its users when this state is reached and action is required.

For now, happy VoIP, but... Be careful, you never know who will be listening in!