TinaPilot, VoIP, QoS and Security

Intelligent Integration of Voice and Data – A world of digital difference

The bandwidth efficiency and low costs that VoIP technology provides, has meant that businesses and education establishments are gradually beginning to migrate from traditional telephone systems to VoIP systems to reduce their telephone costs. With the even tighter integration of both voice and data – this migration is likely to quickly accelerate.

VoIP solutions aimed at businesses have evolved into ‘unified communications' services that treat all communications—phone calls, faxes, voice mail, e-mail, Web conferences and more—as discrete units that can all be delivered via any means and to any handset, including mobile phones.

Equiinet can provide systems that use VoIP technology as a key part of its TINA (Telephony Integrated Network Architecture) based offerings – including TinaPilot with its converged technology running both voice and data communications over a single network, which significantly reduces infrastructure and running costs.

Another key component of TINA, to truly allow integration of telephony and data, is the ability to offer sophisticated QoS (Quality of Service) to customers. Quality of Service is the ability to provide different priority to different applications, users, or data flows, or to guarantee a certain level of performance particular communication types. For example, a required bit rate, delay or bit error rate may be guaranteed. Quality of service guarantees are important if the network capacity is variable, especially for real-time streaming multimedia applications when utilising VoIP, online games or IP-TV, since these often require fixed bit rate and are delay sensitive, and in networks where the capacity is a limited resource - for example in mobile data communication.

Several kinds of solutions have traditionally been competing in this converged technology market space: one set is focused on VoIP for medium to large enterprises, while another is targeting the small-to-medium business (SMB) market. Notably, Equiinet offers affordable pay-as-you-go services to both SMB the sector and to its Education customers.

Equiinet's latest product, TinaPilot, uses highly integrated converged technologies such as Voice over IP (VoIP), together with sophisticated Quality of Service (QoS) techniques to provide combined voice and data communications solutions for schools and businesses. This unified communications approach significantly improves flexibility while reducing both infrastructure and running costs and can be packaged up into a simple pay-as-you-go monthly fee. TinaPilot implements the blueprint for the next generation integrated appliance - Telephony Integrated Network Architecture (TINA).

The revolution impacting telephone handsets

For a hundred years the same technology, usability and pricing principles have applied to telephone handsets. Now the prices of phone handsets on VoIP are lower than for legacy analog PBXs and key systems. VoIP switches may run on lower-cost and more efficient system hardware as with Equiinet's TinaPilot. Rather than closed architectures, latest VOIP devices rely on standard interfaces and have simple, intuitive user interfaces, so users can easily make system configuration changes. Dual-mode mobile phones enable users to continue their conversations as they move between a mobile phone service and a Wi-Fi network

PSTN integration

TINA-based products such as TinaPilot have the ability to directly connect to existing PBX systems to allow interoperation between existing phones and new style VoIP equipment. The TINA architecture also allows for direct connection to/from the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN).

TinaPilot supports the E.164 standard to allow calls to be routed to and from VoIP subscribers and the PSTN. Its VoIP implementation can also allow other identification techniques to be used. For example, interoperation with Skype allows subscribers to choose ‘Skype names' (usernames) and SIP implementations can use URIs similar to email addresses.

TINA implementations employ methods of translating non-E.164 identifiers to E.164 numbers and vice-versa, such as the Skype-In service provided by Skype and the ENUM service in IMS and SIP.

Echo can also be an issue for PSTN integration. Common causes of echo include impedance mismatches in analog circuitry and acoustic coupling of transmit and receive signals at the receiving end. This is not a problem for TinaPilot.

Security

Traditional VoIP telephone systems are susceptible to attacks as are any internet-connected devices. This means that hackers who know about these vulnerabilities (such as insecure passwords) can institute denial of service attacks, harvest customer data, record conversations and break into voice mailboxes.

TinaPilot has an integrated advanced firewall which has undergone thorough independent testing. Equiinet has been an established name in data security, threat prevention and firewalls for more than twelve years. Advanced firewall, Intrusion detection/prevention systems, Anti-Virus and Anti-Malware scanning systems, as well as Anti-Spam mechanisms are all available. TinaPilot also fully integrates at a local level with intelligent filtering systems such as Smoothwall Guardian, NetSweeper and SmartFilter giving even greater control over group or individual Internet access.

Security of the VoIP switches within an organisation with a firewall protected network and the facility security provided by ISPs make packet capture less of a problem than originally foreseen. Further research has shown that tapping into a fiber optic network without detection is difficult if not impossible. This means that once a voice packet is within the internet backbone it is relatively safe from interception. However, if sophisticated encryption is used as with TinaPilot, these concerns disappear.

Encryption

TinaPilot can encrypt both voice and data traffic providing multiple levels of security, including use of Virtual Private Network (VPN) technology employing multiple encryption techniques and algorithms. Multiple types of VPN are supported allowing interoperability with many other devices and access to PCs and Servers on the LAN for support purposes etc.

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