The advantages of UC for businesses, employees, customers and busuiness partners are well-known. UC empoweer them to communicate anytime, anywhere, using any device. However, many companies beleive that implementing a unified communications solution will prove too expensive for their limited budget and require replacing their whole infrastructure.

1. infotelecom.ca 14 June 2015
F E A T U R E S
T H I S I S S U E
Opinion
The Future State of Competition in the
Telecommunications Market in Canada
Collaboration
UC: The Light at the End of the Tunnel
Internet of Things
The Internet of Cyborgs
Lifelong Learning
Telecom 2015 – Toronto – 27-28 October
Communication Technologies for Enterprise
How to Avoid Phishing
W I T H I N
News & Views
p. 2
Editorial
p. 3
The Future State of
Competition in the
Telecommunications
Market in Canada
p. 4
p. 6
The Internet of Cyborgs
UC: The Light at the
End of the Tunnel
p. 12
Kneoledge
p. 18
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2. 12 JUNE 2015
COLLABORATION
Microsoft Cloud
Services Coming to
Canada Physically
Microsoft will
physically extend
commercial cloud
services in Canada in
2016.While the
software giant has
made tremendous
progress driving cloud,
this decision
represents a significant
step to accelerate
Canadian customer
adoption and
consumption of its
cloud services.
Microsoft claims to be
the only commercial
hyperscale provider to
announce the
provisioning of cloud
services in Canada.
With a commitment
to providing its
customers with “A
Cloud ThatYou Can
Trust”, Microsoft will
soon offer them a
suite of cloud services
residing in Canada,
including Azure, Office
365 and CRM Online.
This expansion into
Canada complements
Microsoft’s Trusted
Cloud Initiative and
could be a significant
differentiator in the
Canadian marketplace.
UC:THE LIGHT AT THE END OF THE TUNNEL
MAURICE DUCHESNE
Maurice Duchesne has been working in
telecommunications since 1987, with both
equipment manufacturers and service
providers. Since 2008, he has helped
organizations implement real-time
communications into the unified communication
(UC) arena. Maurice is a member of the
Community of Telecommunications
Consultants (CTC) and can be reached at
(514) 317-9391 or mduchesne@UCconsult.ca.
n my article UC: One Size Does Not Fit All,
published in the March 2015 (#13)
issue of InfoTelecom, I defined unified
communications (UC) as the convergence of
real-time and non-real-time communications
with business processes. Today, unable to find
more complete a definition, I suggest that we
take action.
The advantages of unified communications for
businesses, employees, customers and business
partners are well-known. UC empower them to
communicate anytime, anywhere, using any
device. However, many companies believe that
implementing a unified communications solution
will prove too expensive for their limited budget
and require replacing their whole infrastructure.
Thanks to advances in UC technologies and in
cloud computing services, it is increasingly
affordable for small and medium-sized companies
to access unified communications solutions as a
service (UCaaS), even if they could not previously
make that investment.
However, let’s not forget that as a technology
becomes simpler in practice, it also becomes
increasingly difficult to plan for and implement!
Before making any decision, it is important to
identify your key, high-priority services. In short,
what needs to be unified!
Looking carefully into the strategy of the
equipment manufacturers and service providers, it
is obvious that the first challenge that arises is to
properly unify real-time communications (RTC);
in essence, synchronous data communications.
I
Figure 1
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3. COLLABORATION
New CEO for Cisco
Network equipment
powerhouse Cisco's
long-serving Chief
Executive Officer, John
Chambers, will step
aside to make way for
an insider, Chuck
Robbins, who will take
the helm this summer.
Chambers has been in
charge since January
1995, an incredible 20
years! The transition
will take place on 26
July, at which date
Chambers will
become executive
chairman of Cisco (he
is the current
chairman). During the
Chambers era, Cisco
annual revenue grew
from (US) $1.2 billion
to $48 billion, and its
workforce from 4,000
to 70,000 employees.
It acquired 269
companies for $80
billion. Robbins, a 17-
year Cisco veteran,
was Senior VP of
Worldwide Field
Operations. He will be
steering one of the
world’s biggest
technology companies,
one that faces an array
of challenges. For
example, enterprise
customers are shifting
away from internally-
operated computer
systems toward cloud
services, and are
deploying new
software that reduce
the need to buy
switching hardware,
which impacts Cisco’s
traditional business
built under Chambers.
Let’s now focus on the main synchronous data
applications that your network will process in
real time and that are essentially relevant for
businesses (Figure 2).
Then, we will focus on how they will be
processed by your computer network.
Is your network ready for real-time
communications?
Implementing a unified communications
network such as Microsoft Lync (recently
renamed ‘Skype for Business’) seems very simple
from an application point of view.
Pick a network connection, install a few Lync
servers and make sure to carefully follow the
step-by-step instructions provided online.
Configure a few SIP accesses with your telephony
system in order to enable voice and implement
the client software, sign up and import users
from your Active Directory and you are done!
You now have unified communications! But is it
truly that easy?
In truth, from an installation point of view, it
really is. Microsoft offers many tools as well as
questionnaires on requirements, planning and
design assistants, implementation methods and
models to help plan, design and operate a Lync
network topology. Using those tools, a skilled
Microsoft administrator is able to configure
many servers fitting Lync’s requirements and the
equipment your business needs.
However, if the staff in charge of applications
install servers without carefully paying attention
to your network infrastructure, it is possible that
your users’ conversion will not happen without
problems. Complexity will increase with video
and workstation sharing, or the increase in user
workload will push the network to its limits.
While the implementation of Lync can seem to
be completed within the constraints of your
budget, your operating teams could face
unforeseen costs and a wide variety of problems
in the future.
Most of the data traffic on your network is not in
real time or is compensated for bad connections.
It uses the Transmission Control Protocol: TCP
keeps sending data packets until they arrive
intact to their destination.
The media traffic that carries voice and video
data in real time (RTC) in unified
Figure 2
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4. T
Phybridge Teams
Up with SaskTel
Toronto’s Phybridge, a
provider of innovative
VoIP solutions
infrastructure,
announced in April a
strategic partnership
with SaskTel in a joint
effort to bring hosted
voice solutions to the
businesses of
Saskatchewan.
SaskTels' Integrated
Business
Communications
(IBC) is a cross-
platform application
that offers users a
hosted IP unified
communications (UC)
solution with
improved
communication and
collaboration tools.
The objective of IBC
is to offer an end-to-
end solution that
allows businesses to
easily modernize their
communications
platform gaining the
UC benefits offered.
Critical to this
capability is
incorporating the
Phybridge PoLRE
switch as part of the
IBC offering, a switch
that delivers Ethernet
and power over a
single pair of wire
with four times the
reach of traditional
Ethernet switches,
allowing customers to
transform their
existing voice
infrastructure into an
IP network with
power.
COLLABORATION
14 JUNE 2015
communications applications uses the
parameters of the User Datagram Protocol. UDP
does not plan for packet reception monitoring.
Therefore, there is no margin for error: lost
packets are truly lost and will not be resent, thus
degrading further the sound and video quality,
which the user will not fail to immediately
notice (Figure 3).
As was mentioned in my previous article entitled
Communications… Unified or Not? (InfoTelecom
#9, March 2014), the user’s experience is
strongly dependent on his perception and
influences his tendency to adopt and use the
service.
When you replace your “good old” reliable PBX
or traditional telephony service with IP or UC
applications, you must without fail keep the
confidence of your users. Even if voice sound
quality and technical reliability remain
equivalent or better, each minor incident will be
examined in minute detail!
In many large companies, IT governance for
applications, networks and voice
communications is done using various groups
that do not necessarily work well together and
come with their own budgets and goals.
Moreover, many different providers are involved,
which turns monitoring, operations and
troubleshooting into real challenges. The
successful integration of unified communications
services in your company requires that these
providers work together closely and establish a
global strategy to turn your traditional data
network into a real-time media network.
UC deployment assessment
Telephony, videoconferencing, workstation and
applications sharing using unified messaging are
strongly influenced by service quality (QoS) and
by the configuration of all the elements of the
network chain between users.
Real-time audio/video services will push the
capacity of your network to its limits and reveal
any weak links between the end points,
weaknesses you did not even know existed. You
could be surprised!
In general, some elements can be dysfunctional,
overused or not properly configured to meet the
demands of media traffics. A few examples:
• Call allowance control parameters that do not
correspond to the end-to-end network, or
Figure 3
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5. QoS parameters that are not adjusted to real-time media
traffics
• Increase in delays or in the amount of lost packets due to
WAN access overuse
• Unstable connections due to bad configuration, bad
execution or overload of local wireless network segments
• Latency problems caused by inefficient geographical
design or bad IP routing in the network
• Slow sessions caused by erroneous
DNS responses
• Poorly adjusted firewalls or other
security controls for real-time traffic
and SIP accesses causing connection
or functional errors
• Errors in end-to-end Ethernet
interface configuration anywhere in
the network, which can cause bad UC
service, increase load and critical
business traffic and be difficult to
accept for users
• Poorly performing computers and bad
audio/video peripherals that can
cause the user to have a bad
experience
Many of these weaknesses already exist
but were not noticeable in the past
because real-time communications were
used very little or not at all. There are
therefore sufficient reasons to proceed
with a pre-deployment assessment of
your network before offering unified
communications services to your users.
Many UC providers have for some time
recognized that the success of the
implementation of a UC solution is heavily
dependent on network infrastructure.
Therefore, they have made pre-
deployment assessments mandatory.
Obviously, if you have already deployed a
UC solution and you are now facing service
quality issues, you can still use assessments
such as these to identify the problems and
reconfigure or update your network or the
COLLABORATION
systems causing issues.
A unified communications deployment assessment can
be tackled in many ways
• Pre-deployment tests
If a unified communications solution has not yet been
implemented, the assessment can be made using a testing
procedure to determine the details of every site, every link’s
bandwidth, the QoS parameters, and the number and type of
JUNE 2015 15
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6. T
a
c
e
T
eBay Spins Off
PayPal
Under pressure to
split the company into
its faster growing
payments business,
PayPal, and its legacy
e-commerce
marketplace, eBay, the
board of eBay did just
that, announcing last
fall a plan under which
its PayPal and eBay
businesses will be split
into separately traded
public companies by
the middle of 2015.
This separation
triggers a change in
PayPal’s customer
policies. If your
organization uses
PayPal, we encourage
you to familiarize
yourself with the
updates. PayPal is
updating its User
Agreement,Acceptable
Use Policy and Privacy
Policy. All of the above
mentioned updates
will go into effect on 1
July 2015 (Canada
Day!).
COLLABORATION
16 JUNE 2015
users at every site in order to be able to predict
how the unified communications functions will
be used.
Many solution providers offer tools to determine
requirements, user profiles, usage forecasts and
current infrastructure details, and to help design
the necessary topology, server infrastructure and
bandwidth requirements.
• Traffic simulation
As mentioned above, in many companies,
network components that are managed by
different entities or providers can in many cases
make it difficult to obtain usage results for all the
necessary components in the configuration.
It is then better to perform end-to-end traffic
simulation tests through the generation of
multimedia traffic in real time between the
different pieces of equipment that are involved,
until a specific level of congestion is reached.
You will then be able to identify the weaknesses
that users will experience on your network if
nothing is done to fix it during the use of real-
time audio and video applications.
While generating traffic flows, monitoring can
be performed on network components through
the use of usage routes, routing, lost IP packets
and jitter values, as well as QoS and security
parameters. Be aware that performing those tests
in a live environment can affect other
operational traffic if not all elements are
configured properly or if unexpected problems
arise.
Do I need to unify my communications?
The consumer technology and social media
revolution has changed the way people
communicate and collaborate at work.
Employees know very well which means of
communication is optimal to transmit a message
in a specific context – chat, email,
videoconference, voice, or file sharing. However,
they often lack the ability to share information
with their customers, partners and colleagues
through the most appropriate application or
device in a world that increasingly moves toward
mobile technologies.
Businesses should not underestimate the power
and the potential of those tools – or the risks of
business data storage on unsecure terminals.
They should explore new options while keeping
business procedures under control.
Nowadays, many cloud services providers are
able to offer unified communications services
(USaaS) with usage-based billing models:
companies only pay for what they actually use.
Thus, the initial investment for a small or
medium-sized company is significantly reduced
and the barriers to entry to unified
communications are lower, which enables the
implementation and the strengthening of their
competitive position compared to larger
companies.
Virtualization is one of the innovations that make
UCaaS a simpler, faster and cheaper solution.
Moreover, in a virtual environment, many
applications can function on a single physical server,
which allows using a simplified server infrastructure
and reduces costs.
It is important to remember to ensure that the
chosen technological solution uses universal and
open standards so that other operating systems
and new devices can be added to complete the
UC solution without requiring major new
investments.
Conclusion
Unified communications can be implemented
affordably and effectively in your firm’s private
cloud or in a public cloud. The choice between an
initial upfront investment versus usage-based
operational costs depends largely on your
financial and strategic business goals.
Ultimately, decisions concerning the use of this
technology and the commercial aspects of its
implementation should always be taken
according to the company’s needs and not only to
the costs. The UCaaS offers available on the
market should enable small and medium-sized
companies to gain access to unified
communications solutions more affordably and
to get a glimpse, in 2015… of the light at the end
of the tunnel!
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