I have been working with channel banks, fxo, e&m and fxs cards for the last ten years. Well, I’m sick of it. Analog telephony seems to follow the Pareto principle, it responds for 20% of the income and 80% of the problems.
Here is a list of the most common issues found in the field when using analog channels.
- Damage caused by lightning. Even with grounding and protection we keep receiving modules for replacement. Now that we are in the thunderstorm season, every week we receive equipment for RMA at Shopvoip. 80% of the RMAs are related to analog equipment.
- Distortion, echo and electromagnetic interference. It is very common to find voice quality problems, caused by some external source such as an electric motor, lamp reactors and others. These problems are very hard to troubleshoot without going directly to the field.
- Incompatibility with analog modems, faxes, alarms. Hundreds of hours spent on the integration of legacy analog devices in an IP network. Usually ending up on frustration, these hundreds of hours are rarely paid by the customer.
- Analog call progress sucks! The busy tone detection rarely works. Sometimes we have to move to some old analog witchcraft also known as polarity reversal.
- No precise billing on FXO lines because it is hard to detect the answer signal. Again, polarity reversal, if available and cost effective, could help.
- Incompatible International Standards. CallerID identification, Busy Tones are different for each country, making our life miserable when having to support these standards.
- Pulse dialing detection for IVR. I think this was the ugliest piece of technology ever invented, please don’t even think on wasting your time with this.
On the other hand, what are some of the most important advantages of IP telephony:
- The cost reduction of moves, adds and changes
- The acquisition and maintenance costs to support separate networks
- Extension mobility (no fixed places in the office, saving tons of money in office space)
- Missed calls, Dialed, Received Calls (Very handy on costumer service)
Well, you lose all of this benefits using analog telephony. The difference in price per port comparing analog versus low end IP phones compensates? Think about this on your next project.
In summary, needless to say that there are still some cases where analog lines are important and useful, but we should definitely move ahead to IP Phones and IP SIP devices. The era of analog telephony is gone and we have the responsibility to catalyze the change process. In your next project, think about charging more to integrate analog telephony, you probably are going to spend a lot of time and loose some hair in the process.
Please, answer the poll on the right side of this bloq. Are analog lines worth the time spent?
