Eric, with all due respect, NT is not sitting around waiting for Cisco to take over it's market. It's news like this that is CRITICAL in trying to assess who is REALLY winning in the race to convert circuit-switched network to packet-switched network.
Tell me ONE major Carrier who is using Cisco technology to run IP Telephony END-TO-END right at the gateway level. The Packet players have no idea what they are getting into when you are dealing with REALTIME voice conversation where small issues like Latency, Lost Packets, Network Congestion, QoS (Quality of Service), Network mgmt, and 99.99% Network UPTIME rears it's ugrly REALITY CHECK into all these ridiculous PC based and router based IP telephony pretenders.
Don't you think there is a reason why the IP Telephony has less than 1/2 of 1% of all network voice traffic? And even the players that supposedly use IP to transfer voice packets is actually routing 90% of their calls through the circuit-switched PTT network.
Eventually IP telephony will rule but the point is that the IP Telephony actually has the greatest advantage at the edge of the network once it starts replacing the old POTS 64K copper wire -- not at the Carrier level where everything is ALREADY DIGITAL and packetized.
INTERVIEW-BT says ahead in Internet phone race
By William Schomberg
MADRID, Dec 20 (Reuters) - British Telecom Plc and Canada's Northern Telecom
(Toronto:NT.TO - news) have a lead in the
race to develop Internet-based telephony after producing a new system with the sound
quality of a traditional network, a BT
executive said on Monday.
BT's Spanish unit will begin switching clients to its new Internet Protocol (IP) Telephony
system in January and big global
telecoms companies are watching for the results of the pilot project, Teofilo del Pozo,
managing director of BT
Telecomunicaciones SA, told Reuters.
Voice Over IP Telephony has been around since the mid-1990s but until recently users
complained that the poor quality made them sound like robots.
With new technologies to improve sound quality, several international carriers now offer
Internet-based calling services using normal telephone terminals.
BT says its new system -- developed by Northern Telecom -- goes a big step further by
replicating a public switched telephone network (PSTN) and getting rid of
the echoes and other distortions that have so far plagued Internet phone calls.
``Tranporting voice data is easy. What's difficult is getting it to public network standard,'
del Pozo said in an interview.
Key to BT's new system -- which cost about $120 million to develop -- are ``gateways'
that turn conversation into ``packets' of IP, the computer language of the
Internet.
By eliminating the need for expensive, conventional switching equipment, capital costs
would be cut by 50 percent, del Pozo said.
Operational costs would be 20 percent lower than existing networks, providing carriers
with precious extra efficiency at a time of growing competion and falling
tariffs.
Customers should see the benefits quickly too. Financial companies with an army of
traders on the telephone all day will be able to pay only for the time their traders
actually spend talking because the IP system automatically allocates unused capacity
elsewhere in the network during conversation pauses.
THE BOOM'S JUST BEGINNING
But other telecoms companies are also getting their latest IP Telephony systems
together. U.S. carrier Qwest Communications International (NasdaqNM:QWST -
news) -- a long-time provider of Web-based calls -- and U.S. fibre optics provider Level
3 Communications Inc. (NasdaqNM:LVLT - news) are the frontrunners,
del Pozo said.
``We're at the very start of the boom in Internet telephony,' del Pozo said. ``Big
operators are waiting to make sure they can migrate millions and millions of calls in a
short time period. Migration is not easy.'
BT Telecomunicaciones expects it will take about eight weeks to change its 150,000
mostly corporate clients to its IP Telephony system, del Pozo said.
The system will be used for voice operations initially with multi-media services to be
added in the third quarter of 2000.
AT&T (NYSE:T - news), BT's partner in the Concert joint-venture for multinational
corporate customers, has agreed to use the system for BT in future IP
Telephony projects, del Pozo said. |
