IP at the crossroads: Vendors provide carriers with a host of approaches to new networks

The barrage of Internet protocol-based telephony and fax products emerging from Networld + Interop is a clear omen of things to come for carriers, Internet service providers and solutions manufacturers alike.

For many, the writing is on the wall: The next generation of great networks will be based on data, with voice being just one of a number of forms of communications mixed among the various packets.

Already, data takes up a preponderant amount of network traffic-from 60% to 80%, according to several studies. IP telephony software is improving in sound quality, interoperability and ubiquity. And the ease with which H.323-based voice products can be combined with collaborative computing software could mean a new way for people to work together.

While these ideals are shared by many, ideas on how they will be achieved are not. Several opposing paths to the IP future exist, each one favoring a different player-the carrier, the ISP or the end user.

For smaller ISPs, the costs of a standard gateway system could prove prohibitive without an alliance with other ISPs of similar size.

One company, MediaCom, is taking an approach that would minimize the up-front costs to ISPs, providing what may be an attractive model for ISPs that are looking to get into IP telephony in a hurry.

MediaCom's approach, based on its MediaRing Talk software, is to transform the computer into an active telephone ready to receive calls (see above figure).

"All other Internet telephony solutions require either a gateway from the service provider or that an end user have his computer permanently turned on and connected to the Internet to get calls as they come in," said Ede-Phang Ng, CEO of Singapore-based MediaCom.

The MediaRing Talk system uses a standard telephone line to alert recipients that an IP call is coming and automatically logs the computer on to the Internet.

MediaCom's directory server, based in Southern California, resolves the two parties' IP addresses, and the two client PCs establish the voice connection.

The business model for the product is unique. Partner ISPs would not be charged for offering the service, and because all the software can be downloaded from MediaCom's server, ISPs don't face mandatory costs to establish the service. The ISPs charge their customers $4.95 a month for unlimited calling.

MediaCom makes its money from the product in a unique way: advertising. "MediaRing Talk started out as a videophone application," said Ng. "The problem was, people are not ready culturally for videophones. They want an experience that's close to the one they are using now. So we had this window free. Why not use it and make the cost to the customer as low as it can possibly be?"

Other vendors, while hoping for the same high level of penetration, don't think price is a viable incentive, especially for domestic calls.

"If regular phone carriers are offering calling at a low rate already, the prospect of saving a few cents on each call is not going to be enough to get them to change the way they place phone calls," said Omey N. Nandyal, chief technical officer of Open Port Technology. "There's got to be something more than that, or people will keep calling the way they always have."

Chicago-based Open Port's plans are to sell products in three markets. The company's Harmony network service provider family of software products is targeted at two segments-tier one and tier two service providers (see figure below).

The company's Harmony customer premises equipment and Open Port software developers' kit/application programming interface (API) are aimed at providers of applications that will take advantage of IP's versatility.

Unlike many IP telephony products, the network service provider line was designed from the start to be a carrier-level platform rather than an expanded version of a hobbyist's product. The products exploit a proprietary technology called Least Cost Routing, which routes messages over the Internet or intranets to the lowest-cost node or point on the network.

>From there, the system routes the message to the final destination by using a much cheaper local call over the local public switched network.

Open Port is selling its network service provider product to carriers. UUNet, MCI and IBM already are using the software to support IP-based services. Open Port is distributing its developers' kit and APIs for free, hoping to seed the market with applications that make the customer's voice-over-IP experience unique and more productive than traditional telephony.

Initially, applications for existing telecommunications functions-primarily fax and voice-are expected, but future developments are limited only by the software engineers' imagination.

"By doing this, we hope to be in the client computers and the backbone and at the same time," said Nandyal. "If you own the backbone, you own the IP network."

Another contender in the IP telephony arena, Phoenix-based Hypercom Network Systems, is emphasizing call quality as the factor that will induce callers to forgo the phone for some of their calls.

"Despite the obvious savings potentially inherent in bypassing traditional long-distance and international phone services, many customers have refrained from sending phone calls over the Internet or other packet-based networks for fear that the sound quality wasn't quite good enough," said Paul Wallner, president of network services at Hypercom. "Carriers and Internet service providers, in turn, have been slow to promote such services. Users want the assurance of true toll-quality, not near toll-quality."

To achieve toll-quality voice suitable for carrier/ISP applications, Hypercom is using the new digital signal processor (DSP) technology and speech encoding algorithms. High-quality speech is maintained even when users are experiencing up to 5% packet loss.

Traditionally, toll-quality is associated with transmission speeds of 64 kb/s. Hypercom's new toll-quality algorithm uses 9.6 kb/s of bandwidth per voice channel and 8 million instructions per second of DSP power.

It also provides error correction for lost packets, said Wallner. "When a packet loss is detected, the previous packet is substituted to fill in that missing sound," he said. "These are small elements of speech, not words, so the caller sounds just as clear as he would be over a traditional network."

Hypercom plans to leverage its improved sound quality products and a base of business-focused applications for the technology.

Recently, the company announced a solution to interface Internet telephony into corporate PBX systems. PBXPlus allows most corporate PBX systems to connect to lower-cost Internet or frame relay networks without any changes to existing voice systems.

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