Voice over IP takes center stage: VON conference focuses on new telephony

A series of announcements made at last week's Voice on the Net Conference in Boston indicate that, despite the technology's relatively young age, backers of Internet protocol-based telephony are wasting no time trying to establish it as both an adjunct and an alternative to the public switched network.

Several announcements were aimed at positioning Internet service providers as potential carriers of voice traffic, giving them the ability to compete with the incumbent telecommunications companies in their regions via the Internet.

Clarent Corp. unveiled a turnkey system for ISPs that includes a gateway server for transitioning between the Internet and the public network and a pair of call management software packages focusing on small and large-scale operations, a potential boon for ISPs desperate to add new services and sources of revenue. Both software packages can be programmed to follow universal dial rules and can be adjusted to support load balancing by allowing users to route calls according to gateway use.

"Until recently, telecommunications companies, Internet service providers and enterprises were unable to gain the benefits of adding real-time voice conversations to their IP networks," said Jerry Chang, chief executive officer and co-founder of Redwood City, Calif.-based Clarent. "Our Internet telephony products provide these customers with the benefits of reliable real-time voice calls while offering them the scalability and management architecture they need to run their businesses."

Other companies also announced their own IP gateways. ViaDSP Inc. unveiled a self-contained, carrier-grade platform designed to give value-added resellers, system integrators and service providers an open platform on which to build complete voice-over-IP gateway solutions.

The PacketTel-1000 Gateway provides gateway functionality to an external host computer through a Socket-based application programming interface (API) called the Gateway Control Interface. This API provides a flexible, open platform that allows the gateway to be managed by any application or remote host regardless of operating system.

Parsippany, N.J.-based Dialogic Corp. unveiled its own H.323-based IP telephony server development platform. The DM3 IPLink server will provide an open development framework to simplify custom system configurations and field downloads of software upgrade modules.

Other announcements at the conference focused on improving sound quality, long the bane of voice-over-IP solutions. Voxware demonstrated a solution for improving the quality of voice-over-IP networks. The VIPSuite software development kit provides developers with weapons to fight latency and clarity problems by using new core compression/decompression technology and transmission tools. These tools dynamically adjust to real-time network conditions, enabling the development of products that deliver the highest possible transmission quality.

"VIPSuite has been engineered to tolerate a high rate of delayed packets and still maintain excellent intelligibility," said Jeff Hill, director of product management for Voxware. "By combining Voxware's quality of transmission tools with our new scalable codec, VIPSuite offers a revolutionary set of tools for developing low-bandwidth voice-over-IP applications that are rapidly approaching toll quality."

In the two years since its introduction, the market for Internet and IP-based telephony has grown exponentially, analysts said. A recent Frost & Sullivan study revealed that Internet telephony

Today's broadband operations support systems are crippled by the inability of legacy OSSs to properly model the complex new networks. Efforts to perform forklift replacements have failed. Unless the problem is solved, the promise of new technologies will go unfulfilled. www.internettelephony.com

Brooktrout Technology has formed a strategic relationship with MiBridge Inc. for its call control and compression technologies.

Natural MicroSystems announced enhancements to its Fusion scalable IP telephony platform to support the .323 standard, enabling gateways built with Fusion to support phone calls from a wide range of IP telephony clients.

DataBeam Corp. announced new components for its H.323 Toolkit Series, including the H.323 Gatekeeper Toolkit.