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| VOIP is old hat for Standard Bank |
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| BY PAUL VECCHIATTO, ITWEB CAPE TOWN CORRESPONDENT |
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| [Johannesburg, 15 February 2005] -
Standard Bank has come out of the voice over Internet Protocol (VOIP) closet, admitting it has used the technology for the past four years. The bank says VOIP helped it save R5 million in annual call costs, but it wasn't quite sure of the legality of using it.It is believed that many major South African corporations have been using VOIP technology over their virtual private networks (VPNs) for some time. However, this is the first known public disclosure by one of the largest – a commercial bank.According to Herman Singh, Standard Bank's director of technology and engineering, while the bank and Telkom are partners in a number of hi-tech projects, they never discussed the use of VOIP over the VPN infrastructure that Standard Bank rents from Telkom.“We have regular meetings with Telkom every three to four months and this never came up as a topic of conversation. We never formally asked Telkom for permission,” Singh told ITWeb.Telkom's corporate spokesman, Hans van de Groenendaal, says that since Standard Bank has a full VPN licence, it may run its own voice calls between its branches and head office, as long as it did not break out into the public network.“It is all part of a package that we have been servicing large companies with for some time. It would have definitely been illegal if they had run their own cables from, say, their head office to a branch,” he says.Singh says: “I believe the intent of the law was to prevent a chaotic environment where people would use Skype [free Internet telephone calls] on the public network. Our network, although rented from Telkom, is essentially part of our infrastructure.”According to Standard Bank, about 130 000 interregional voice calls a month are carried across the data network at an average bandwidth usage of 50%, resulting in savings of more than R400 000 a month.Singh says VOIP links have already been established between Swaziland, Kenya, Zambia and Namibia, and international regions such as the UK, US, United Arab Emirates and Russia.”A major benefit of VOIP technology is that local and international voice calls are carried over the data network, which saves considerable costs,” he says.Singh believes deregulation will open up the opportunity to extend VOIP connectivity to other countries, using the infrastructure of different service providers. This will allow the bank to switch calls to the most cost-effective medium and re-route calls across a service provider's network in the event of the overload of the bank's own wide area network bandwidth capacity.He says that in Standard Bank's case, the intelligence in the network will determine the cheapest route, with first preference being given to the bank's own wide area network infrastructure, followed by alternative service providers and lastly the public switched telephone network."Right now we are exposed because we do not have these alternatives."According to Singh, managing voice traffic using VOIP requires intricate load balancing and bandwidth prioritisation. However, the advantages include massive savings in telecommunications, increased bandwidth for movement of large pieces of data, more flexibility for mobile workforces, more security for disaster recovery and business continuity backup systems, more customer relationship management capabilities, and more options for in-house training with video and other applications.“We're looking at all our options. Our jumpstart in terms of our track record puts us in a good position to optimise VOIP's potential,” Singh says.
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