From VoIP to Unified Communications and WebRTC
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We’re talking today with Claire Baker, managing director of the Chalvington Group. The company had its origins in the company her father, Melvyn Baker, set up in the ‘80s, and he’d go on to create a telecommunications arm called Chalvington Communications to better serve a wider range of customers with the emerging technology of the early 2000s. Claire joined her father after she completed her BA in Business Studies at the University of North London, and after the various companies merged in 2012, she became the managing director. The company currently has 1,500 clients in the UK, generating £3.8 million in turnover as of 2020 and is a key partner with Wildix in the UK.
You’ve been immersed in the world of communications tech for well over 20 years. What are the key changes you’ve seen since the 2000s?
Claire: The most notable changes are in connectivity and cloud-based solutions. ISDN2/analogue technologies became extremely stale, and the industry was in need of some va-va voom. I feel the investment that has been made in connectivity infrastructure has given telecoms a new lease of life. Don’t get me wrong — VoIP has obviously been available for years but only in areas where you can ensure decent connectivity, which were, until quite recently, few and far between
The explosive growth of the internet created new opportunities, but they also involved new risks, particularly as companies struggled to predict which emerging technologies would thrive and which would fall by the wayside. How did you mitigate those risks, and what long-term strategies do you use to ensure your services are likely to remain relevant?
I’m lucky to have a really good team of IT and telecoms engineers around me who live and breathe new tech. Like any other business, we made some poor choices early on and learnt from those mistakes. Our process is to select a number of manufacturers, put the equipment or software through its paces, create a top three based on what we know would be important to our customers and then these are presented to the relevant managers and directors to make the ultimate decision. This formula has been tried and tested over the years.
There’s been a big push within tech, in general, to include more women in more senior positions. What challenges does the industry have regarding that, and how could they be solved?
Men sometimes believe women aren’t technical. Naturally, there are technical situations that I wouldn’t be familiar with at a grassroots level, but that’s why I have a trusted team around me, some of whom have worked with my father for the best part of 20 years. However, I have always been a firm believer that you don’t necessarily need to know how to do the job to be a good leader — but you need to be able to get work done through others.
Everyone comes into a new business with expectations, and some turn out to be accurate and some less so. What expectations did you have when you became a managing director, and how accurate were those expectations?
What I can say is to be successful, a managing director should be able to manage and advance a business’s strategic objectives and be the face of the business. However, within a small to medium-sized enterprise this, in real life, is far from what takes up most of my time. I find I wear multiple hats, which isn’t necessarily what someone would maybe expect from an MD.
My main focus is on the oversight of the company’s high-level operational and customer-facing problems. We only thrive if we’re competent and able to keep our customers through the service we provide. Processing efficiency and reviewing our operating systems is another, together with the training and development of my senior management team to deliver the company’s values.
Copper cable is out, which has major ramifications for many businesses that rely on analog or digital PBX phone systems. Unfortunately, small businesses often aren’t aware that their current PBX infrastructure is fundamentally incompatible with the upgrade to fiber caused by the great POTS and PSTN switch-off.
Major telephone infrastructure providers such as Openreach in the UK, Verizon in the United States and TIM in Italy already use optical fiber technologies rather than analog copper cable as a core part of their networks. However, a lot of the old-style copper cable remains in the last mile. This creates a major bottleneck when it comes to providing ultra-fast services to the consumer: Copper cable is slow and obsolete — hence the POTS and PSTN switch-off.
However, copper cables are powered, and fiber-optic cables are not. This is partly where the problem lies with old-school PBX telephone systems.
A PBX is a private branch exchange. This essentially allows users to share a number of external phone lines through the use of extensions. The PBX routes an incoming number to a main switchboard, where it can be answered, or if an extension number is inputted, it can route it to the right person directly.
On-premises PBX phone systems are usually built into the fabric of a building, with many buildings of the ‘80s, ‘90s and early 2000s having extensive cabling run throughout the walls to facilitate this. These systems were a useful solution for the time, and they went from requiring a manual operator to having automated systems.
But there are several major issues with these systems: They work with copper cabling, and they have a limited feature set. Sure, you can forward calls, queue and put people on hold. But it’s not easy to integrate other systems into the PBX, such as instant messaging or video calling. Even worse, simply moving to a digital ISDN telephone system won’t work; that’s being discontinued too.
It may be possible to get your current analog PBX to accept an IP input, and there’s a wide range of options to do so. However, as many technology enthusiasts know, as products reach end of life, the equipment to maintain them becomes much more expensive, and replacements are equally as pricey.
Those who remember the analog TV switch-offs of the 2000s and early 2010s may remember that they could get adaptors for their old analog TVs, but these are now notoriously unreliable. Worse, those TVs are unable to accept the full feature set available. The accepted solution now is to go digital.
The same applies to analog PBX telephone systems. Cable upgrades, repairs and overall maintenance costs will only get higher compared to a digital system. Even worse, a physical system means it’s harder to route a call to someone who’s not at their desk without another layer of switching.
Businesses that have lots of phones and no real need for enhanced connectivity may wish to consider a converter. This might include:
The last use case typically refers to businesses where a PBX system was installed many years ago but they now primarily use mobile devices to conduct business. However, even then, they may wish to consider an upgrade, thinking about how a unified approach to communication may benefit their business. And the hospitality industry can definitely benefit from the wider range of services offered by a cloud-based PBX and its associated unified systems.
The two main challengers to analog PBX telephone systems are on-premises IP PBX systems and cloud-based PBX telephone systems. These use the same essential internet technology but in different ways:
Larger businesses that already have dedicated PBX systems often prefer the on-premises solution, although it can be difficult to quickly expand if they’re moving to new offices. Setup can be tricky as well. For agile large businesses that need flexibility, a cloud-based solution often works better than an in-house system, especially as their workforce becomes more distributed due to remote working.
Smaller businesses usually find that cloud-based PBX solutions are more in line with their budgets and their existing IT commitment, letting them leave most of the work to the third party.
As with any technology rollout, there’s a range of dates across different countries. Plans also vary depending on how the incumbent or dominant telephone provider plans to switch over to fiber, and there are substantial commercial and logistical hurdles to doing so.
Ultimately, as copper networks continue to be switched off across the globe, company PBX systems will need to be upgraded. And cloud solutions such as Wildix can be rapidly deployed across thousands of systems in a few easy steps.