Tuesday, March 3, 1998
Ascend jumps into voice-over fray
By DAVID BRAUE
The growing market for voice-over-IP
technology got a boost with Ascend
Communications' announcement it will add
voice-over-IP support to its remote access
products.
The move makes Ascend the latest in a string of major networking vendors investing millions
to implement the technology, which lets customers slash communications bills by transmitting
STD and international voice traffic for free over existing data networks.
First implemented as software "Internet phones" in 1995, technology letting users transmit
voice conversations over the Internet has forced telecommunications companies to
dramatically rethink their long-term network strategies.
Fearing the loss of long-distance calling revenues (one survey suggested AT&T alone could
lose $US350 million ($525 million) to Internet telephony by 2001), a consortium of US
telecommunications companies in 1996 launched a futile campaign to protect their revenues
by having voice-over-IP technology made illegal.
The fledgling voice-over-IP market took a big step towards corporate legitimacy in 1996
when the ITU ratified the G.729 voice compression standard, which enables toll-quality voice
calls using just 8Kbps of bandwidth instead of the 64Kbps telcos traditionally used.
As corporations increasingly rely on WANs to interconnect branch offices and business
partners, data volumes are soon expected to surpass those of voice traffic.
Making lemonade out of the voice-over-IP lemon, telecommunications service providers now
hope to minimise their revenue losses by leveraging voice-over-IP technology to their
advantage.
Despite telcos' optimism, however, voice-over-IP technology doesn't yet provide the
scalability and reliability that carriers need for large-scale deployment of such services,
pointed out Doug Ferguson, Asia-Pacific general manager with Nortel Micom.
"We have a standard [G.729] which has been recognised as providing high-quality voice," he
said, "but for major carriers it doesn't have the capacity or resilience they're looking for.
"They have a substantial infrastructure and are continuing to use it, but we're starting to see
interest from more nimble second-tier service providers who are looking to increase their
margins by using the efficiencies that can be gained from using new technology. There are a
lot of capabilities that can be built into these networks, but there are still a few things to iron
out."
Cost will be a big obstacle to large-scale deployment of voice-over-IP solutions, warned
Primus Telecommunications' senior manager for network planning, Roger Nicoll.
"At the moment, port costs of [voice-over-IP] hardware are about double that of a traditional
telephone exchange," he said, "and bandwidth requirements are higher than on a purpose-built
telephone network.
"It's an area that attracts a lot of attention, but we can't see any incentive for us to move in
that direction at current price levels; very few corporations or carriers in Australia can afford
to purchase that much bandwidth. It's an idea for private network environments, but I don't
see it getting widespread corporate use for at least five years."
Hoping to make carrier-class voice-over-IP a reality much sooner than that, networking
vendors have in the past year begun racing to integrate voice capabilities into their
high-capacity switches, routers and remote access hardware.
Last September, Cisco Systems announced it would soon release voice-over-IP capabilities
for its 3600 series of remote access devices, and in January the company spent $US160
million to acquire Lightspeed, a US vendor of call control and protocol conversion software
that links PABXs and other telecommunications equipment over IP.
"Customers have traditionally had three networks - LAN interconnection, SNA and voice,"
said Cisco consulting engineer Michael Boland. "We've had a blending of services, with
people transitioning IBM SNA networks to a common [IP] core. Now, customers are looking
at putting voice over that common core; they're realising they can get a good return on their
investment by putting all three networks over one transmission service."
The race for voice-over-IP got substantially hotter in January, when Cisco arch-rival Bay
Networks invested $US37.6 million in voice-over-IP specialist company Netspeak. The
networking vendor plans to build on Netspeak technology to release a carrier-class
voice-over-IP gateway for its BayStack network switches by early next year.
Ascend's announcement last week signals its intent to jump into the fray, with planned
upgrades to its MAX 4000 remote access concentrators, new remote access devices
tailor-made for voice integration, and a product for connecting company and service provider
networks.
And Nortel Micom, clearly intending not to be left behind in the stampede towards
voice-over-IP, is targeting the service provider market with its Voice/Fax Multiplier, which
squeezes up to 228 voice conversations over an E1 serial link that previously carried 30 calls.
Those Australian companies that have already implemented voice over their data networks
are reporting dramatic savings, with ROIs of just a few months. Combined with bandwidth
reservation and priority queuing technology, vendors' integration of voice-over-IP capabilities
into their network hardware should propel the voice-data integration market to astronomical
heights. |
