Until now, we have mainly discussed the telephony aspect of telephony over IP (ToIP) and unified communications. But the internet connection is obviously essential in their adoption. With the announced arrival of very high speed throughout France, companies will soon have connectivity capable of supporting their IT and telephone needs, including when several dozen PCs and handsets are connected.
Still, the speeds may be insufficient, even with fiber. VSEs and SMEs may indeed be tempted to opt for FTTH (Fiber To The Home). But these offers are shared: the actual speed may therefore be less than expected, depending on the number of households connected in the neighborhood and the time of day. One solution is to opt for an FTTO (Fiber To The Office) offer, with guaranteed speed.
Yet another solution – for those opting for FTTH: it consists in ensuring that the flows linked to telephone communications will always have priority over those originating from the company’s PCs. What the professional boxes that combine data and telephony can manage.
Another parameter to take into account: with all IP, if internet connectivity fails, nothing works. 4G and 5G offering interesting speeds, many operators offer to double the fiber connection by a mobile router, which takes over in the event of a breakdown. Be careful, however, in some cases, this router only relays computer flows and not telephone communications. If you have opted for an IP Centrex, it will however be possible to seamlessly switch the lines to one (or more) emergency number(s). This way, you will remain reachable.
Hybrid SD-Wan: the best for interconnecting sites
Apart from their home uses (well known to budding hackers), VPNs are very popular in business, especially with the rise of telecommuting. They create a secure tunnel between an employee’s computer and the corporate network, which allows access to all of the organization’s resources remotely. Hence the name VPN, for “Virtual Private Network” or “virtual private network” in French. In absolute terms, the VPN could be used to connect two sites together, but it can then show its limits.
To create a network covering several sites, it is necessary to set up a WAN (Wide Area Network). It generally requires the installation of a specific box on each site, which will aggregate the various LANs (Local Area Networks) into a single WAN with completely secure connections between the sites. The largest and best-known WAN in the world is the internet.
To create a WAN, the MPLS protocol (Muti Protocol Label Switching) was used until now, which is now giving way to hybrid SD-WAN offers (software defined), which are more flexible and more powerful. A hybrid WAN is compatible with all types of connections (ADSL, Fibre, 4G, etc.), which is particularly valuable in certain cases: for example, to connect a site office to the head office network via 4G. Additionally, the hybrid WAN can aggregate multiple connections to gain speed and reliability.
The SD (software defined) component, which forms the hybrid SD-WAN, manages flow priorities, application by application, giving priority to IP telephony, for example, ahead of web videoconferences, themselves ahead of other flows Internet. It ensures that, despite the limits of the links between the sites, which form a bottleneck in the global WAN, application performance will always remain optimal.