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Time to play VoIP catch up
As VoIP begins to roll out into the public safety space, we find out what impact it will have on back-office systems and the technical and organisational issues that will have to be faced. Carol Debell reports.
The Ofcom consultation on the regulation of VoIP services and access to the emergency services closed on 20th September and it is likely that we will have to wait until the New Year before we hear what the next steps will be.
But while the issue of access to 999 calls remains very live, what lies behind this concern is the rapid uptake of VoIP within the community at large. The number of households using VoIP telephony doubled during 2006 and it seems likely that 2007 will see similar levels of growth. For emergency service operators, this means that increasing numbers of calls from the public will come via the IP route.
All the arguments that are making IP telephony attractive to the general consumer also apply to emergency services which not only have large internal voice networks but also a high level of inter-agency communications. Until recently, however, this sector had approached the new technology with a certain amount of caution. Paul Collins, Public Safety Business Development with Verint, says this was to be expected. “The public safety sector tends to be very conservative. It can’t afford for its voice communications not to work so it wants to test new technology before it commits.” But he adds that VoIP is beginning to roll out into the public safety space. “What we are seeing is a move to deploy VoIP in the back office – people want to see how it goes before taking it to the front line.” But he adds that all the major infrastructure providers are moving to IP-based systems which means that increasingly contact centres will be able to benefit from lower call costs and the added advantage of not being tied to propriety hardware.
US-based Verint Systems acquired Mercom’s Audiolog brand in July 2006. Audiolog provides recording solutions for mission-critical public safety and government-regulated environments and with the resources of Verint behind it, the brand is now being actively marketed throughout Europe.
But if the public safety sector has been slow to move to VoIP, it is certainly playing catch up now. Arno Sybrandy, Global Marketing Director with CyberTech, confirms that there has been a significant increase in interest in IP solutions over the last six months. “Everyone has been talking about IP for the last couple of years and suddenly we are getting a lot of questions from public safety/emergency services about issues surrounding implementation.” These organisations, he says, face both technical and organisational issues.
CyberTech, a global player in the voice recording sector recently acquired a majority share in its long-term distributor in the UK, Activa Solutions, who over the years has provided communications recording solutions to more than 130 emergency services and public safety organisations in the UK.
One of the most organisational issues to be addressed is the fact that when telephony moves from conventional to an IP platform, existing support services may lack the necessary skills. Paul Collins says this means that the skills of the maintenance engineers will need to change. “There will be a need to retrain maintenance and support staff – in future they will need to be network specialists.” Arno Sybrandy agrees. “The old telephone systems had a telecoms manager but with IP, organisations are moving to a data environment so there will need to be a migration of knowledge.”
Both Paul and Arno highlight the importance of having the right bandwidth in order to get the right quality. Paul Collins says that quality has been one of the major issues holding back VoIP. Arno points out that just because an organisation already has an IP network, it is not necessarily ready for the IP telephony environment. “In our experience, cabling is always an issue and it is important that organisations check their cabling to ensure that there is sufficient bandwidth to handle all the VoiP traffic before they commit. In our view, good testing of the network is essential.”
The stringent requirements placed on emergency services to record and archive all voice messaging means the ability to integrate VoIP into existing recording solutions is essential. Paul Collins says that emergency services will need to be able to live in a hybrid environment for some time to come. “What we are seeing is one part of the building using VoIP, while another part of the building is on a traditional telephone platform. Our system is agnostic and this means that organisations can make a painless move to the IP environment – it protects their investment in the existing infrastructure.”
The latest version of Verint’s Audiolog features high scalability and capacity and increasing recording throughput in order to support the adoption of VoIP technology. “The result”, says Paul, “is that the system offers increased performance, scalability, stability and feature richness with enhanced compression and transfer of multi-channel VoIP recordings and associated call data.”
Arno Sybrandy believes that future-proofing is very important, particularly as IP solutions are developing very quickly. He points out that there are recording systems on the market which have been designed for the analogue environment. “If you are looking at migrating to an IP solution over the next six months to a year, it is very important to make sure that the recording system you buy will be able to handle the new IP-based technology.” CyberTech’s Myracle and Pro recording systems can be used in traditional, Internet Protocol (IP) or mixed telephony environments and deliver high quality recordings for all applications including verification and compliance, dispute resolution, and quality monitoring.
He adds that CyberTech solutions are based on standard, common-off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware which means that users can maximise the attractions of IP telephony. As Paul Collins points out, open standards is one of the reasons that VoIP is so attractive to high volume users. “Historically control centre systems have all been proprietary systems which have tied users into expensive hardware. Now people have the option of lower cost solutions that are easy to deploy and support.”
Dumfries & Galloway are early VoIP adopters
One constabulary which has already gone down the VoIP route is Dumfries & Galloway. One of the main benefits of the VoIP network is that it dispenses with traditional cabling costs. At Dumfries & Galloway, following the approved Cisco pattern, telephone cables are not required and category 5 and 6 ‘Gigabit’ Ethernet cabling is used instead (1Gb/sec) to improve speed and capacity. This means there is no network disturbance and downtime as and when additional users are added.
John Hughes at Dumfries & Galloway, was tasked with upgrading and future-proofing the force’s communications systems. John concentrated on replacing legacy systems and dispensing with their associated manpower and media costs, such as storerooms of accumulated tapes. Hence he needed a recording solution that would cover the constabulary’s VoIP, digital and analogue telephony over one IP enable network.
The network needed to be distributed across 18 different locations and centred upon the force headquarters at Cornwall Mount which is also the location for the new Vivista DS2000 Integrated Command and Control System. In addition to VoIP the constabulary benefits from Airwave digital and TETRA radio technology.
John Hughes chose the AudioSoft solution. In order to record, monitor and playback data from the IP telephony system, AudioSoft’s hardware solution features standard PC rack mounted units which handle 32 analogue and 40 IP channels with playback through a desktop PC. The playback uses COTS equipment and so has a very low cost of replacement and maintenance.
In addition to cost savings, John adds there are a number of other benefits including improved capacity and improved integration. Dumfries & Galloway officers work away from the HQ and dial in to the force network using a standard VoiP telephone at local police stations. The calls themselves can be recorded and replayed in exactly the same way as any other call. All recordings are legally admissible, having been evidentially proven and complying with Home Office guidelines. Streaming enables records to be played seamlessly over the internet, LAN or WAN to other users at their desktop, saving time and cost,
All standards-based VoIP communications over a network can be recorded including both internal and external calls. The AudioSoft system logs all calls-related information thereby negating the need for costly and complex caller telephony integration, while the architected recording solution ensures that no additional load is place upon the network.
The AudioSoft system is modular and allows expansion to the system. It is easy to upgrade and integrate with associated equipment that may be added at a later date, for instance encrypted pages, mobile phones etc as well as the full range of existing Airwave radio systems, analogue and digital telephony which have not yet migrated to an IP platform.
Compared to previous systems, savings on DVD-RAM media (for storage) and the time and manpower previously necessary to transfer them, are significant. The cost of DVD RAM archiving in hardware terms alone has been calculated to 0.76% of those of DAT tapes. Factor in that operators only need to change the DVDs every 60 hours rather than every two hours with tapes, says John, and this becomes a compelling argument for making the jump to a digital network-enabled recording solution.
