Nowhere to Go but IP

The rise of Intenet telephony offers options — and challenges.

So, has your company been bitten by the IP bug yet? If not, you’ve certainly heard the buzzing around your ears. IP telephony transmits voice calls as packets of data on shared lines, an innovation that found its first consistent expression via the desktop PCs of thousands of chatty teenagers who found it a wonderful alternative to Mom’s phone line. Now IP, with its cutting-edge technology and cost-cutting potential, is definitely where the entire telecommunications world is headed. The open questions concern how fast it will get there, what course it will take and what it might stumble over en route.

IP telephony is a crucial element of a larger phenomenon — the fast-moving convergence of data, voice and even video networks into one worldwide communications network. Millions of people all over the world are transmitting text over the Internet at this very moment — some five billion e-mail messages will be sent today, including the spam — and as the Net evolves into a standardized network for communications of all kinds, the ability to manage telephone communications while logged onto the Internet offers tremendous potential to users of not only desktop PCs, but mobile wireless devices as well. When all communications streams — voice, text, graphics, video and multimedia — are carried over one standardized network, the entire range of personal communications options will be available from any point on that network, anywhere, anytime, with any capable device. The phenomenon is called intelligent communications, and it offers an intoxicating level of power to the individual user or business enterprise.

The rapid transition of IP from a low-rent novelty of interest primarily to college students and Internet hackers to a main-vein technology capable of supporting a massive communications network and thousands of business enterprises has a number of drivers including the bottom line. Wireless-service providers, ISPs and other integrated communications providers are eager to avail themselves of the potential cost savings of transporting voice traffic on packet-switched networks rather than older, more expensive circuit-switched networks. The routers and switches of packet-based networks are considerably less expensive to deploy and maintain than the “heavy iron” switches of traditional phone systems.

But perhaps an even more powerful driver is economic opportunity. The wave of deregulation sweeping across the land is drastically changing the competitive landscape, and providers have the opportunity to offer their customers a cheaper and more state-of-the-art solution to voice communications. That solution is the Internet telephony network, a single network for both voice and data, offering scaleable bandwidth and an open architecture. A network like that gives service providers the power — and the freedom — to select best-of-breed solutions and make them work with each other.

This interoperability enables providers to offer new services over the network that will help them compete with and differentiate themselves from their rivals.

Intelligence Shift
The technology itself is a driver in this part of the process. All this innovation means that inside the networks, the components are becoming unbundled and intelligence is shifting from hardware to software. In the new IP world, this shift in intelligence enables providers to have maximum control over the services they create and offer, leveraging their new flexibility with open interfaces. A provider will be able to quickly adapt its service offerings to the unique and fast-changing demands of its customers. And that kind of instant adaptability means lower costs, happier customers and, inevitably, higher margins.

Technical innovation also is addressing a key issue in IP telephony — quality of service (QoS). Many companies will have to upgrade network equipment or add additional bandwidth to ensure adequate capacity even at peak traffic times, and the challenge is to make sure that the QoS that’s being put in place is carrier-grade, without straining either the budget or the IT resources of the enterprise.

One key technical barrier has been lowered. The International Telecommunication Union (ITU), the Swiss-based organization through which governments and big business coordinate global telecom networks, recently approved a single interface standard for the exchange of traffic between packet-based networks and conventional telephone networks. The standard, called H.248, is expected to accelerate the acceptance of IP telephony as a primary telecommunications enabler — a process that appears to be accelerating quickly already. The ITU predicts that more than 25% of all Internet traffic will be IP telephony within four years, and some major public telecom operators believe IP telephony will carry the majority of their voice traffic by 2004.

Anticipating IP
The shadow of next-generation IP networks already is darkening the sales of traditional PBX enterprise phone systems. A Phillips Group report says shipments of new corporate phone systems during 2Q00 dropped a startling 16.2% from the same period in 1999. Analysts say corporate decision-makers are holding off on phone-system investments in anticipation of migrating their enterprises to IP telephony — if IP proves to be an attractive alternative for them.

The transition from today’s circuit and data networks to a converged IP-telephony network is a challenge that service providers view with some caution. Obviously the tremendous investment by providers in today’s networks will be expected to generate returns, and certainly no business enterprise is simply going to toss its existing information-technology systems out the window one fine day and throw itself into IP. So over the next few years, as the build-out of the access network and its intercon-nectivity elements continues, any provider offering IP telephony will have to address the issue of interoperability with the existing systems — how best to extend today’s services into the new IP world, and how to assure that today’s offerings and the new-world services remain compatible. Anyone wanting to play in the enhanced-offering space of IP telephony had better know how to bring the old technology along for the ride.

At the point where the aforementioned build-out is substantially completed, around 2005, the new services will begin to dominate the picture — and in 10 years you’re likely to see the transition completed. Yes, we’ll all be living in an IP world.

So what will that world look like? Well, it could be a very happy place for providers. They’ll find themselves presiding over next-generation, packet-switched networks over which they will have maximum control, able to define and offer services virtually at will, with vastly-reduced operating costs and unprecedented flexibility to respond to customer needs. And with the advent of new IP-telephony offerings from the providers, end users will find themselves able to flex some powerful muscles of their own as they exercise the ability to define and control the information flow into their lives. Consumers will have the remarkable power to decide exactly how, where and when they want to receive every incoming voice call, and into what device they want it delivered.

From both sides of the provider/consumer equation, IP appears to have Incredible Potential.

Irten is ADC Enhanced Services Division director of business development.

---

VoIP Going Mobile?

By Terri Lynn Sullivan

In an effort to offer the influx of next-generation services, wireless providers are migrating gradually from circuit-switched to packet-based networks. Creating this next-generation network is no small feat. Yet, perhaps a larger challenge for the wireless provider is enabling the next-generation of voice and data services that capture the most demanding market.

Although voice over IP (VoIP) technology may be good for small branch offices needing cheap voice, it still is not today’s killer application. A few significant barriers to VoIP implementation prevent the technology from being delivered in real time, much less with the quality of the calls provided on the traditional telephone network. These problems revolve around three factors: quality-of-service (QoS) issues, inter-domain network-management challenges and limited services deployment.

The Internet is still too unreliable to support voice calls. With the convergence of IP routing and optical switching comes the challenge of meshing QoS standards. For instance, multiprotocol label switching (MPLS), designed to help service providers deliver better IP services, has yet to engineer traffic in optical networks the same way the technology steers traffic in routed networks. Providers need a packet-switched network with QoS protocols for voice with IP telephony applications to reliably match a PSTN. The Internet without QoS is unpredictable, resulting in poor or unacceptable voice quality.

The major benefit of VoIP technology is the reduced cost associated with having a single point of management. However, data and telecom are diverse networks, with different priorities and strategies. Network-management tools with common interfaces and alarms are at least two to three years away; therefore, it is difficult to realize any reduced management costs.

Many of the hot applications that are to be the key drivers of VoIP are still at least six months away due to the challenges cited above. However, voice over instant messaging, including instant wireless messaging, may make the most sense as aVoIP application as it does not require the same level of QoS as real-time voice applications.

IDC predicts the U.S. wireless-instant-messaging market will reach 43 million users by 2004. Millions are turning to the mobile Internet as their window to the world.

To succeed, mobile-service providers and ISPs must know where their subscribers are, how they are accessing the network and what information they need — instantly. Wireless providers need to become the second-generation mobile portal. Adding the voice-recognition concept, voice portals give mobile users access to real-time information with minimal hassle. .

This is the area where providers should focus with respect to rolling out VoIP-related services. But how best to enable such services?

Providers may be quick to implement pure softswitch technology, as it promises to give telecommunications the same growth the Internet experienced in the 1990s. However, the softswitch is used only in the tandem layer on the network in the long haul, which does nothing for the provider at the service layer. The overall functionality of the softswitch has yet to be defined, including whether or not it should have a database or just work with one. It is clear that the softswitch performs call control. However, the IP industry is having problems deciding where services should reside, concluding that perhaps service deployment should be distributed throughout the network.

Within three years, billions of real-time voice and data messages will exchanged across the network daily. The existing intelligent-software infrastructure, including softswitch technology, is not designed to handle this load.

A new breed of platform architecture will enable the provider to handle this explosion. It should have a distributed architecture and be able to scale to meet the demands of today’s wireless subscribers. It should be built to process billions of messages a day, host millions of customers and provide continuous computing in a single node. A software-based platform that runs on off-the shelf hardware and spans multiple networks will result in reduced costs for development and maintenance.

This infrastructure gives service providers a fundamental element of wireless instant messaging and is a key component of the mobile portal, enabling revenue-generating, real-time personalized services.

Sullivan (terrilynn@otelnet.com) is OTelNet (www.otelnet.com) product marketing manager.