CRA Inc

6 Oct 04 @ 12:13 pm

Hold the Phone

You may have heard that new, Internet-based phones can offer free long-distance calling, but VOIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol) has much more to offer. Hold The Phone shares some surprising examples of how hospitals, law firms, and other organizations are deploying Internet telephony:

Mark Banner, senior partner at law firm Banner & Witcoff, uses a “softphone,” software that runs on his laptop, when he travels for trials. “I’m out of the office about half the time,” Banner says. “If I’m off at a trial, I may be gone for two or three weeks. So I’ll be at my hotel with a laptop, and calls come in to me the same as if I were in my office.” When connected to a high-speed line, the softphone–with a handset plugged directly into a laptop–allows Banner to initiate calls from his database of contacts, or assemble conference calls easily using a point-and-click interface.

Like trial lawyers, hospital nurses are constantly on the move, and the difficulty of staying in touch with them was the single biggest complaint among doctors at El Camino. Last spring, the hospital began experimenting with the Vocera device, which is small enough to be clipped to a lapel. The devices–the company calls them “badges”–are entirely voice-controlled. To reach a nurse, the doctor speaks the name, and the nurse’s badge will in turn ask, “Can you take a call from Dr. Evans?”

“We can say, ‘Call radiology,’ and all of a sudden, you’ve got a radiologist on the line,” says El Camino’s Tarver. “And the phone works on all six stories of the hospital, plus the basement.” It taps into an omnipresent Wi-Fi wireless network that’s also used to provide connectivity for portable computers.

Internet phones plug into a standard Ethernet jack–the same type of outlet a computer uses–and users can carry their phone from one office to another, plug it in, and instantly begin getting calls there, without relying on technicians to set them up. (Most voice-over-Internet phones don’t look much different from standard desk phones.) When Trimble, a GPS technology company based in Sunnyvale, California, moved its corporate headquarters from one side of the street to the other last December, director of global-information-systems operations Shawn Wilde told employees, “If you’re in a big rush to use your phone in the new building, just pick it up and bring it with you.”

Since Internet phones are tightly integrated with the data network, users can control their desk phone from their PC, which makes it easier to take advantage of certain functions, such as setting up and running large conference calls. (Additional participants can be brought in while a call is in progress, and loudmouths can be muted with a mouse-click.) With a feature called “unified messaging,” copies of incoming voice mails can be directed to your email inbox. “That lets you plug a headset into your laptop and handle your voice mail while you’re on a plane, even though you’re not online,” says Wilde. Your answers to those calls are stored digitally on the laptop, then sent when you have a live connection. “Or if you don’t need to respond with another voice mail, you can tap out an email answer, and it’ll get there the next time you connect,” Wilde says.

Others choose to do the opposite, listening to their emails over a telephone. When Avaya vice president of product marketing Jorge Blanco commutes to work in New Jersey–a drive that can last anywhere from 20 minutes to an hour, depending on traffic–he listens to his unread emails, spoken by voice synthesizer, and unheard voice mails. “I can launch a phone call with anyone who sent me a message just by saying, ‘Call the sender.’ I can knock out 15 to 25 messages on the way to work, replying, forwarding, and having live conversations, without having to touch the keypad.”

posted in category(s): Points of Interest