VoIP Providers List Worldwide VoIP Providers Directory

While VoIP has been making headway in technological improvements, it still isn’t perfect. If it were, everyone would have deployed at this point. In the past some people had pointed to the lack of 911 support as VoIP’s Achilles’ heel, but that small stumbling block has been addressed by the industry. Instead, one of VoIP’s biggest weaknesses when deployed in the enterprise is not even a communications technology issue, it is a power issue. The oft-forgotten downside of VoIP is the fact that when power goes down, so do the phonesif your organization isn’t prepared, that is.

Can You Afford An Outage?

Power reliability is always an issue for IT networks. When systems go down or Internet connection is lost, productivity plummets. Businesses lose thousands as employees twiddle their thumbs. Usually in past cases of IT downtime, there was always one service that workers could count on being online: the phones. Rather than writing emails, working on the database, or otherwise focusing on computer-based tasks, powerless users would at least be able to salvage some productivity by catching up on phone calls.

That prospect could all change if a business implements VoIP without considering power implications. According to a recent Cisco study, the typical user site experiences at least 15 power incidents every year. If the phones go down each time one of these incidents occurs, IT will undoubtedly have to answer to red-faced managers.

This is why it is imperative that power equipment be figured into TCO projections for VoIP rollouts. If the cost of power equipment isn’t spent on the front end, the exponentially higher cost of downtime will be spent on the back end. Not convinced? Consider this: Just this year, the NIST issued five major recommendations when it comes to business deployment of VoIP. The following was one of the five: Evaluate costs for additional power backup systems that may be required to ensure continued operation during power outages.

"Costs may include electrical power to maintain UPS battery charge, periodic maintenance costs for backup power generation systems, and cost of UPS battery replacement," says the government report issued in January. "If emergency/backup power is required for more than a few hours, electrical generators will be required. Costs for these include fuel, fuel storage facilities, and cost of fuel disposal at end of storage life.”

While these precautions are often par for the course when it comes to power backup preparation at large enterprises, many small to medium-sized enterprises are woefully unprepared for power events. According to Emerson Network Power, more than 60% of SMEs polled don’t use UPS protections for their networks. If you are in this camp and have decided to implement VoIP, it might be time to change your ways.

Juicing The Phones

So why are VoIP phones different from PSTN or PBX phones? The reason is that all PSTN and most PBX handsets get their power supplied through the standard wiring. While the PBX back end may be dependent on a UPS to keep the entire system running, the phones themselves are generally self sufficient.

This is not true for IP phones, which require some kind of power source to stay up. On top of that, all of the network infrastructure that supports the phone systems, such as routers and switches, must also be protected from power outages. So the VoIP power backup effort becomes two-pronged, providing protection for the phones and for the systems that run them.

Power Over Ethernet

There are two options when it comes to providing power to IP phones. The first is to use power adapters and plug them into the facility’s power grid. In this case, a separate UPS desk unit must be provided for each phone that requires availability during power interruption. The second choice is to supply power through the Ethernet lines. PoE allows for greater flexibility in terms of power backup. By feeding the handsets with juice through the wiring, administrators are able to consolidate the power required to run these units. As a result, a single rackmount UPS in the wiring closet can be used to back up all of the handsets in a group. Unless an organization is small, this solution can provide significant savings over the plan to provide UPS units per phone. But more importantly, the consolidation will allow IT to keep a better eye on backup equipment and build more redundancy and availability into the environment.

A number of companies offer appropriate UPS choices for wiring closet setups. The one you choose will need to support the sum of the watts ratings of the loads supported by the IP telephony equipment supported on the racks in question. Most setups will draw between 500 and 4,000W single phase at 120VAC or 208VAC. To support this range, anything between a single rack all the way to a five-rack (5U) UPS will be necessary.

APC offers a number of models appropriate for this type of setup. On the smaller end of the scale is the APC Smart Online UPS, a 1U unit for less complicated load setups. If you are looking for more reliability, the 4U APC Symmetra RM is a choice that can offer up to 99.999% reliability.

TrippLite also has a range of UPS products specifically designed and released to address VoIP needs. The SmartPro line-interactive model is a 3U unit that can simultaneously back up 120VAC and 208VAC equipment. Two SmartOnline UPS models offer true online conditioning of power. The first, a 5U unit, offers support of 208VAC, while the second, a 7U unit, offers support for both voltages.

As mentioned before, the problem of backing up VoIP power doesn’t stop at the handsets. Regardless of whether you are consolidating backup through a PoE setup, there will be a need for a rackmount UPS for the infrastructure that supports these handsets.

by Ericka Chickowski