KEY POINTS:
Despite Skype's phenomenal success - or perhaps because of it - internet phone technology is still viewed with suspicion.
VoIP (voice over internet protocol) is considered by many to be nothing more than a cheap and nasty option for saving money on international toll calls.
So when Dean
Zanone, a former Californian police sergeant, comes to New Zealand to preach the benefits of IP as a communication tool to improve the effectiveness of our emergency services, can he be serious?
Zanone is dead serious - in a very affable, easygoing West Coast way.
Now retired from the Seal Beach Police Department, where he oversaw the building of an IP emergency services network, Zanone works for communications technology giant Cisco Systems.
He was in New Zealand last month to speak at an emergency management conference in Wellington about how such systems can enhance public safety by improving emergency services' communications networks.
As he points out, the self-preserving nature of the internet - a connection between two points can be made via whatever path happens to be available - makes it a very robust communications platform.
The most poignant example of where IP has shone when other communications networks have failed came out of Hurricane Katrina, which devastated New Orleans in 2005.
With the city's phone networks down, the deputy mayor went on the scrounge through an Office Depot store for IP telephony gear which he then used to rig up a VoIP line that enabled President George W. Bush to call Mayor Ray Nagin.
"The data networks that were already in place were robust enough to shift over to voice traffic so they could have communications between New Orleans and Washington because everything else had failed," says Zanone.
His vision is that police, fire and ambulance services will increasingly use IP for voice, video links and data sharing.
"If you look at [emergency services] voice radio systems, how much time is spent with one person describing to another what they're seeing, trying to get that situational awareness or that view, when maybe a voice radio system isn't the best way for them to have a view. Maybe it's video, maybe it's GIS [geographical] information, maybe it's access to a database," he says.
"When you look at the private sector and you see how they're using the virtualisation of the conference experience to share applications - and it's for business purposes, generally for profitability - why shouldn't we be able to elevate the communications flow involved in public safety to the same degree?"
Zanone is right that big business is crunching the numbers on IP communications and increasingly liking what it sees.
At the corporate level, any stigma associated with VoIP is now gone. While Skyping via a dial-up modem at home may be a crude way to communicate, in the business world IP phones now outsell traditional handsets and the quality of service issues have been sorted out.
"Unified communications" - the IP-based Nirvana of giving staff one inbox as the repository of all your emails, mobile and landline voice messages, text and instant messages - is increasingly being talked up by technology vendors.
Allan Mendelsohn, senior unified communications marketing manager for technology company Avaya, says the business case for making staff more contactable is compelling.
Avaya's research found 40 per cent of employees picked up an important message late four to five times a week while 34 per cent of "lost revenue opportunities" were attributed to not being able to connect to the right person at the right time.
Mendelsohn says Avaya customers using unified communications are reporting all-important "revenue per head-count" figures up 20 per cent.
Tony Jayne, general manager of Agile, which sells Avaya's technology in New Zealand, says after a "bedding in" period for IP telephony in the local business market companies are looking at how they can get the most benefit out of it.
Unified communications has particular appeal for call-centre operators who can ditch expensive CBD sites in favour of "virtual" call centres where inquiries are re-routed to staff members who can be working anywhere in the country.
"We're going through that transformation now, not driven exclusively by the technology but driven by the businesses starting to understand how they can leverage the investments they've made in IP telephony to deliver real value," says Jayne.
The bad news for workers is IP is making it harder to hide from the phone. "I was away from my desk" may be long gone as an excuse for missing a call. If people like Zanone have their way, even "my city's just been levelled by an earthquake" may not be acceptable.
