Hey guys, here's a good laugh...

As you may remember, the company I work for is due to move into a new 
building that's nearly completed now. Well apparently when they turn the 
phones on in this new building, the phones in our existing buildings 
will stop working. And apparently that happens this week.

But all is not lost. According to our Director of Lab Operations, all we 
need to do is go down to the nearest shop and buy a couple of those 
new-fangled "Skype phone" thingies and all our problems will magically 
go away. (Don't you just love it when managers who know nothing about 
technology come up with technical solutions?)

Well anyway, obviously I know precisely nothing about VoIP. I understand 
that such a technology could theoretically exist, but it's news to me 
that it has ever been deployed on a large scale.

(Certainly for home telephony it would seem to present a vast range of 
disadvantages too obvious to enumerate. OTOH, some people look only at 
price and don't really think these things through properly... Anyway, 
whether it's suitable for home use is rather irrelevant here.)

So, here's a few questions:

1. How much bandwidth does a system like Skype require? [You'll recall 
that where I work we are desparately short of bandwidth.]

2. Is Skype really trustworthy? [You can guarantee that no matter how 
much I warn them, if we end up using Skype and some person manages to 
steal confidential data as a result, it will somehow be "my fault".]

3. Is Skype really reliable enough to run absolutely mission-critical 
functions? [My personal preferance would be to buy a couple of real 
mobile phones. Last time I checked, mobile phone network operators have 
actual *laws* they have to abide by. Skype is not so-encumbered.]

I see that the guys at Google have their own VoIP software that you can 
use for free - but it doesn't appear to allow access to the PSTN, so I 
don't think it will be of any use here. Indeed, presumably *any* system 
that can talk to the PSTN will by definition cost money...

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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