Govt. Looks Into Migrating To VoIP

Govt. agencies are increasingly interested in migrating to VoIP, govt. and industry officials told Communications Daily. The migration has started with some agencies adopting VoIP for individual buildings and conducting pilots. But wide deployment isn’t expected at least until 2006, when the Networx contract, a successor of FTS 2001, is expected to be awarded.

“We are seeing some sporadic movement toward VoIP,” said John Johnson, GSA’s Federal Technology Service Assistant Comr.- Service Development & Delivery. He said most agencies were moving toward an MPLS [Multi Protocol Label Switching] IP environment, which allows integration of voice, video and data services. He said VoIP services were being implemented mostly “in a campus environment, but not enterprise-wide.”

“We do want to go that way,” said Gary Wall, who leads the Dept. of Health & Human Services (HHS) participation in the Networx contracting effort. “The [VoIP] technology is proving itself,” but “the decision has to be based on a sound reason and a good business case that would support [the agency’s] mission,” he said: “Each business case should be made on its own and where VoIP is a solution, we are going to use it.” Wall said the HHS would go through an evaluation process when its systems approach the end of their life cycle: “We'll have to make a business decision at that time. If the cost of replacing the infrastructure [to migrate to VoIP] is comparable to regular telephony, then it’s probably the prime time to move to VoIP.”

Wall said the HHS has been conducting VoIP trials for a couple of years, adding that some agency divisions, such as the Food & Drug Administration, plan to use VoIP “on a large scale” in the next couple of years. He said the agency already replaced regular networks with VoIP in several of its divisions, including the Office of Secretary. “Right now, the majority of our agency is still [using] traditional telephony, and with the price points we get under FTS 2001, the business case hasn’t been made to have a complete migration [to VOIP,]” he said.

The FCC has been watching VoIP growth for some time but hasn’t made a decision to switch, a spokeswoman said: “Our Auctions Division has some VoIP phones, but at this point [they are] not widespread at the Commission. We are evaluating to determine whether [VoIP] would be more suitable for a more widespread use at the Commission.”

Govt. is a slow adopter of new technologies because of the critical nature of its communications infrastructure, industry sources said. One of the major exceptions is the Defense Information System Agency (DISA), which has converted its headquarters system to VoIP. But a more typical case is the Dept. of Treasury, the Postal Service and the Dept. of Agriculture, which have moved to IP platforms but aren’t ready to put voice traffic over them due to security and other concerns. The Veterans Administration is going through trials but hasn’t committed to VoIP.

Some govt. agencies are expected to migrate to VoIP earlier than others. “The main reason has to do with the robustness of the infrastructure,” consultant Warren Suss said: “VoIP needs very robust IT infrastructure to avoid interruptions in service. When the LAN goes down, voice service goes down.” Suss said agencies like NASA and the Dept. of Defense (DoD) were “more likely to move to VoIP with minimum risk,” because they “have invested in very high reliability infrastructure.” He said DoD had “additional motivation” to move to VoIP because it’s “just made gigantic investments in a new WAN infrastructure. This program [the Global Information Grid Bandwidth Expansion] has created large pipes with lots of capacity to handle voice service. It is also extremely robust, with electronic and physical redundancy.” Precursor Group analyst Scott Cleland said “mobile agencies,” such as Dept. of Justice, Dept. of Commerce and DoD, “that have people in the field should be exceptionally interested in VoIP” because of the mobility it offers.

The Dept. of Homeland Security, which oversees 22 agencies, likely will become an earlier adopter, said SBC Regional Vp Quinten Johnson: “By moving to VoIP, they will adopt a common network and will standardize their systems rather than having 22 separate networks.” Most of the other agencies will probably use VoIP as a complementary service for now, he said. For example, he said, the Postal Service likely would take a slower pace due to its size.

With Networx expected to be awarded in 2006, experts said most of the govt. could switch to VoIP by 2006 or 2007. Networx will provide services that currently are satisfied under FTS 2001, plus emergent services, such as VoIP. “I believe that we are beginning to experience higher quality of VoIP service, so in contracts we will award in 2006, it’s possible that some service providers could use VoIP to deliver voice,” GSA’s Johnson said: “We are not specifying the technology. We are going to specify that we want a voice service and what quality we want and the industry can offer VoIP if they can meet the requirements for the quality.” Johnson said he saw “some introduction of IP telephony” by the time Networx will be awarded, but the timing for wide adoption of VoIP by the govt. “depends on how mature the service is and whether the industry can provide it reliably end- to-end.”

VoIP offers many advantages over traditional telephony that govt. agencies could benefit from, sources said. Organizational convergence is one of them, Suss said: “Merging information technology and [voice] communications into a unified [central information office]-type organization, so you don’t have separate groups [of people] managing voice and data will make it easier [for agencies] to move to VoIP.” Wall said major VoIP advantages include flexibility, allowing HHS to “make moves and changes within the agency without intervention from the carrier,” and “reduction of toll fees for long distance calls.”

Network security is viewed as a major hold-back for the govt. in migrating to VoIP, experts said. “We are deeply concerned with the security,” GSA’s Johnson said: “We are concerned that… in the IP environment all communications will be riding over the same IP network. So, if there is an attack, both data and voice could be affected. Our concern is that we are putting all our eggs in the same basket. We don’t have these issues fully addressed.” He said GSA had identified “a lot of security measures that will help us avoid some threats,” and was putting a working group together, which would focus on IP security issues. But HHS’ Wall said “security concern in itself is not the reason not to deploy VoIP. We have security concerns about everything that we do.” “Security is a concern but not a show stopper,” Cleland said: “It could be more serious to some agencies than others.”

There are “a lot” of misconceptions about VoIP, and “one of them is saving a ton of money,” SBC’s Johnson said. He said that was “not necessarily true because you have to upgrade all your network links to handle VoIP and that’s a significant expense.” He said it was often a “shock” for govt. customers to find out about the costs of initial deployment of a VoIP-capable network. “Some government agencies don’t realize the magnitude of the work that needs to be done to go to VoIP,” Johnson said: “A lot of government agencies are in old buildings, and to move to VoIP is a major undertaking. Some buildings in D.C. have walls 3 feet thick and it’s hard to drill those walls to put new fiber networks.” But he said “over time, [govt. agencies] would spend much more money on supporting 2 separate networks for voice and data.”

Lack of service reliability is another draw-back for VoIP deployment by the govt., SBC’s Johnson said. While wireline service offers 99.99% reliability, that’s not the case with VoIP, he said. Johnson said it would be also hard to use VoIP to prioritize voice calls in case of an emergency: “VoIP has to be designed with a lot of diligence to have that type of redundancy.” GSA’s Johnson said the problems with VoIP are “issues such as latency… When you are communicating voice, you want to make sure that the packets will arrive at the same time and in the same order. You need to make sure you have sufficient bandwidth and other capabilities that will satisfy the customer demand.”

The industry is in active talks with govt. agencies on VoIP implementation. “We already are having discussions with [12-15] federal government agencies and we are seeing a lot of interest,” Qwest Dir.-Civilian Agencies Sales Tony Bardo said. He said his company planned to modify its existing GSA contracts to add VoIP to the services it already provides to govt. agencies. “We are very actively talking to many of [the agencies] right now,” AT&T Product Mngr.-Govt. Solutions Rajesh Natarajan said. He said AT&T is working on “a couple of contracts” which he couldn’t disclose. He noted that AT&T had been offering VoIP services through MAAs “for some time. It’s not a new thing for us.”

“We are trying to get [VoIP] pilots going with certain government agencies,” SBC’s Johnson said: “We had a few meetings with the Dept. of Treasury and the Dept. of Veteran Affairs.” He said SBC was involved in several trials “but I haven’t seen a very big deployment [of VoIP] in the government. It seems the government is doing a lot of assessing on what the costs are” and what advantages and disadvantages VoIP offers. He said his company planned to compete for Networx “very vigorously” and would try to become the primary contractor, rather than a subcontractor: “A lot of federal customers don’t want to have several contracts for different services. They want to have a one-stop shopping to get contracts for all services from one source.”