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Griffin Internet was established in 1993 and has fast become one of the UK channel success stories in recent years with strong organic growth being recognized by both industry and business awards including the Sunday Times Tech Track and the Deloitte Technology awards.

That growth has been achieved by continual investment in the company’s business-only ISP network and the development of innovative products and services to support the UK reseller community. Investments have been made to bring the national network to MPLS standard and to lay foundations for future product launches such as Engineered Broadband. This solution will allow resellers to prioritise voice over data on a converged voice and data line, to facilitate Quality of Service required for voice.

Those network investments have brought Griffin to an enviable position as a trusted partner to deliver the wide range of VoIP products that the resellers are supplying to their own customers. The company’s IP network offers a robust national platform and is supported by a technical support desk manned by experienced technical engineers.

High profile and successful VoIP resellers including Gamma Telecom and Kingston Communications have recently partnered with Griffin to deliver their own VoIP products across the Griffin Internet IP network. The Griffin network only carries business traffic which has allowed the company to focus entirely on creating the right platform for business solutions such as VoIP.

ISPs who offer both business and consumer services are more prone to ‘bursty’ traffic demands, which can play havoc in providing VoIP services. Business use routers which are continually switched on and have consistent usage throughout the day compared to consumer traffic which tends to have spiked demands at certain points in the day. Griffin’s network traffic is more consistent during the day and therefore more manageable.

QoS Required?

VoIP products don’t necessarily need QoS guarantees if they are not competing with other applications for the bandwidth. However, with increased convergence between data and voice, this is not normally the case. QoS ensures that specific traffic can be prioritized even if the end-user is using other bandwidth-hungry applications at the same time on the broadband line.

Adrian Sunderland, CTO, Griffin Internet: "Operating a business-only network gives us a huge advantage in terms of providing a robust environment in which to deliver VoIP products. Many ISPs have tried to get around their congested networks by offering Class of Service (CoS) guarantees, but this does not go as far as our QoS guarantees."

Class of service manages traffic by grouping similar types of traffic for example email, video and voice. However this does not guarantee a level of bandwidth availability.

"Griffin Internet’s technical engineers are well trained to offer solid support to all resellers as well as to provide branded first line support to the resellers’ own customers. For those technical issues that cannot be resolved immediately, Griffin run a very efficient ticketing system, which allows us to track complex issues and escalate issues appropriately, whilst keeping the customer in the loop at all times."

Sunderland continues, "VoIP usage within businesses is set to grow strongly, especially with the cost of handsets coming down and the overall performance of the technology improving. We have been running seminars to educate the reseller as to how to effectively sell this into their own customer base and we are seeing a groundswell of enthusiasm and improved understanding of VoIP."

Andrew Dickinson, Sales and Marketing Director: "Griffin sells only to business via the channel and the majority of our 300 white label partners are in the voice business. Consequently we may be a good barometer of progress in moving the SME market onto SIP trunking and IPCentrex. If we look at our network in a busy hour around 8% of our broadband lines are carrying SIP sessions with average bandwidth usage at that time of around 10k. You could draw the conclusion from this that approaching one in ten of our business customers are experimenting with VoIP in some form however the very low average usage would indicate that they are not using more than one voice channel and even then not very heavily.

If 8% of a broadband base carrying business-voice traffic seems high then remember that Griffin has become the ISP of choice for VoIP and IPCentrex interconnecting directly with all leading suppliers. Other ISPs may have a far lower percentage of their business broadband customers attempting to use broadband for voice."

Source The Channel Guide VoIP – a supplement from Comms Business