Future of IP Telephony: Smarter, Not Just Cheaper
By Brian Caulfield, April 6, 1998
iw.com
Advocates of IP telephony at the Voice on the Net conference in San Jose
last week offered many visions of where they see the technology headed.
Imagine a phone service that can translate English into Japanese. How about
one that can make you sound like a movie star? Or another that can tell you
when your friends are on the phone? "It has to be the applications that drive
IP telephony. If it's just about transport, it's not compelling," said Francois de
Repentigny, an analyst with Frost & Sullivan, a Mountain View, Calif.,
research firm.
IP telephony will have to do more than provide low-cost phone service,
because the low prices may not last forever, observers said. [See "IP
Telephony Sees Price Wars."]
"Someone has to pay for the infrastructure," said de Repentigny.
Joe Rinde, director of switched network architecture at MCI, said that with
increasing amounts of bandwidth being brought into the home, phone calls
made over the IP network will eventually be made with CD-quality sound.
Rinde said the future of IP telephony lies with the ability to develop better
quality and functionality than conventional telephony. For example, he said, IP
telephony will allow businesses to replace Private Branch eXchange (PBX)
telephone switching systems with PC-based software.
"When your PBX system sits on a PC platform, the costs will plummet, and
developers will come up with APIs that allow much more functionality at a
lower cost," Rinde said. "Imagine being able to program your PBX box
through a Web interface."
Eric Sumner, group ventures vice president in the Switching and Access
Systems Group at Lucent Technologies, said IP telephony vendors could one
day offer voice modification, telephone buddy lists, and even, perhaps,
on-the-fly language translation.
But some said the hype is a long way from reality.
"The maturity of an industry is inversely proportional to the amount of hype
that is in vogue in those industries," said John Peters, general manager and
executive vice president of network services at Concentric Network, a
business ISP in Cupertino, Calif. "We've got a long way to go before we turn
this into a real business."
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Keywords: telephony
Date: 19980406
Copyright 1998 Mecklermedia Corporation.
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