The Voice over IP Telephony results in savings in communication costs. It has also been gaining considerable attention over the last year. However the adoption of the Voice over IP technology has been slow in India because of the high initial investment required to set up a Voice-over-IP (VoIP) network.

With the recent cut in national long distance (NLD) charges, a question mark has formed around the cost-effectiveness of the Voice over IP technology. Most of the enterprises are reluctant to invest lakhs of rupees on Voice over IP, with concerns that they may not get decent Return on Investment.

However, if we look at the enterprise angle the given fact is that 70 percent of a company's communication costs are in the form of intra-office STD bills. Therefore for enterprises Voice over IP continues to make sense.

In certain enterprises there have been cases where communication costs have reduced by 60 percent after implementing a Voice over IP telephony solution. The period for return on investment on equipment has dropped from ten years to three.

The usefulness of Voice over IP is not just saving money. Voice over IP lets corporates take advantage of a host of value-added services like integrating voicemail, video, e-mail and fax.

If an organization already has an enterprise WAN set-up with an existing data network, with a 64 Kbps leased-line facility, there is all the more reason to add voice capabilities to the data network, thus making even better use of precious bandwidth.

The advantages of Voice over IP over traditional telephony are:
- lower costs per call, especially for long-distance calls
- lower infrastructure costs: once IP infrastructure is installed, no or little   additional telephony infrastructure is needed
- new advanced features
- future proof as functionality is software (protocol) based and does not require    hardware replacement