Learning to walk

Not unlike a toddler taking its first few steps, proponents of Internet voice service are beginning to find their legs. However, it also is clear, according to several executives at last week's Spring Voice on the Net show in Las Vegas, that the market is at least some time away from a steady gait and years away from an all-out sprint.

Perhaps summing up the feelings of the 2000 or so delegates at the show, Level 3 CEO James Crowe said, "The current market is a mess, but it will lead to innovation."

Before that can occur, though, vendors must be on the same page with interoperable gateways that can scale to large carrier requirements.

Taking one step in that direction, Ascend Communications said it has moved its voice over Internet protocol capabilities to its largest access switch, the Max TNT. Under the same MultiVoice program it has for its smaller boxes, the newest TNTs will be able to support up to 672 ports, or a full T-3 (44.7 Mb/s) per chassis. Additionally, the product is one of Ascend's first to support IP device control, a standard that likely will be phased into the new media gateway control protocol.

"MGCP is still pretty fluid," said Jose Garcia, managing director of MultiVoice IP products. "It's still being defined in the standards bodies, and we needed to ship product to customers now."

In a separate announcement, NetSpeak Corp. demonstrated its full product line interoperability with Cisco Systems' and Motorola's gateways. The move gives NetSpeak a significantly larger addressable market, said John Staten, chief financial officer. "We're moving [toward] not offering just pieces, but full solutions."

Interoperability also was at the core of several announcements from protocol vendors. RADVision, which supplies H.323 protocol stacks to several gateway vendors, announced the development of a forum for vendors and carriers to resolve interoperability issues. The Passport to Interoperability effort echoes several other forums but will concentrate on protocol-level issues, said RADVision President Michelle Blank. "We must have multiple efforts because there's no one interoperability initiative that will solve the problem."

Looking toward future applications, Trillium Digital Systems announced what it claims is the first general packet radio service (GPRS) protocol stack. Using GPRS, vendors can build wireless appliances that can be used for data-centric services, said Jeff Lawrence, president and CEO of Trillium. Trillium, which has been marketing more traditional telecom protocols, is slightly behind the H.323 curve, but not too far, he added.

"It's still pretty early on in the process," Lawrence said. "You're going to see a stage where people are going to be building lots of small networks."

Indeed, according to Mary Evslin, vice president of marketing for ITXC, all the discussion about moving the VON market away from cheap long-distance minutes is premature. "We as an industry love to talk about advanced services, but I don't think there's a market in Indonesia for that yet."