Technology - IP revolution Data beats out voice in networks. "
from forbes.com
do search and type in "ip telephony"
select article: "1. Forbes Digital Tool: Technology - IP revolution
Data beats out voice in networks. "
5/18/98
By Jeffrey Young
Telecommunications market will topsy-turvy
in the next few years for the simple reason
that most telephone traffic of all kinds is
going to be delivered over the Internet, or
Internet-like networks that make use of the robust
Internet protocol (IP) to move everything from
your call to the Home Shopping Network to the
video on your television.
Internet protocol (IP) is far-and-away the best
way to send data around because it is simple,
ubiquitous, will work at whatever speed the
connection supports, and can go at varying
speeds along its route. This last factor is crucial to
the swift uptake of the Internet, and the future
demise of the phone networks. No longer is a
highly specified, highly controlled end-to-end
telco-maintained pipe required. IP data works
better in that world, but it does just fine in a
heterogenous, chaotic, ever-changing network of
peers, too. The prime example is the Internet.
Fax and E-mail already start out as data, and get
converted into not-quite-as-good signals for the
voice world; voice mail is almost always
manipulated and stored by a computer. Add web
browsing and surfing, and E-commerce as it starts
to finally catch on and the world turns upside
down. By some estimates as much as
three-quarters of all telephone traffic now could
already be more easily handled as data. Today it
increasingly makes sense to pass everything as
data and strip out the voice, which will feed a
joint voice/IP gateway equipment market for a
while. But then it will all be data from end to end.
Here's how to see what's at stake: Twenty years
ago there were 100 million E-mails sent each
year, versus 135 billion pieces of first class mail.
Last year the two reached parity: about 190
billion each. Many of those E-mail messages
would have been voice calls without the Internet.
Imagine a minute each, at 15 cents a minute, and
that is $20 billion in lost voice revenue due
directly to today's data networks.
|
