What It'll Take for Softphones to WorkWhat It'll Take for Softphones to Work

Can current systems handle the way people really work?

Ever have one of those days where the corporate VPN is running so slow that you find yourself clicking on something, waiting, then tearing out several tufts of hair that you can ill-afford to lose, then coming up with creative new combinations of words you usually reserve for other drivers on the commute you're avoiding by working at home, then restraining yourself from choking your laptop as if it were the sworn enemy it has opted to become, then finally when all seems lost, whatever you clicked on responds?Then you think to yourself: What if I were on a softphone?

When Fred Knight moderated a VoiceCon San Francisco session on the future of the phone, an audience comment about the unreliability of softphones drew cheers from the crowd. I suspect that in many cases, the softphones themselves are not the culprit, but the users.

Let me explain. We've been trained to multi-task on our computers, but sometimes our network connectivity, and sometimes the computers themselves, don't really handle multi-tasking all that well. If everything's in the cloud and your connection to the cloud is running less than ideally, to the point that applcations like email and web browsing are suffering, what chance do real-time applications have?

Are our IP networks--as they're actually deployed and, more importantly, used, really capable of carrying real-time traffic--as it actually runs? If you upgraded your "data" network for voice a few years back when you began your IP telephony deployment, how certain is it that your real-time IP traffic patterns are still the same as they were then? If your workforce has become more dispersed, is your network really configured to handle that?

Everyone's chasing strategic value in communications, looking for applications and integrations that are capable of fundamentally changing how we do business, but if the underlying network can't support that deployment, it'll change how you do business, all right--and not for the better.

We want to assume a fully functional IP network and get right to the cool stuff, the way the economist stranded on the desert island in the old joke wants to assume a life raft. But that may be no less wishful thinking in the enterprise's case than it is in the marooned economist's.Can current systems handle the way people really work?