PACKET VOICE COMING ON STRONG ALL
OVER INDUSTRY
Jun 9, 1998 (VOICE TECHNOLOGY & SERVICES
NEWS, Vol. 17, No. 12) --
Vendors, service providers, and their customers are
taking
voice-over-packet technology seriously.
Vendors have recently shown their latest
voice-over-frame relay
(VoFR) access devices, while placing a greater
emphasis on the emerging
voice-over-Internet protocol (VoIP).
It could be considered odd that voice-over-packet is
an issue at all.
We've been told, after all, that ATM is the perfect
networking protocol
for the transmission of traditional voice services
over data networks.
Unfortunately ATM standards for voice traffic are a
work in progress,
and limited to simple circuit emulation. The current
ATM voice and
telephony specification handles ubiquitous, digital 64
Kbps voice
connectivity, and only allows for limited
supplementary services such
as multiple subscriber number and calling line ID.
Voice Over Packet an Accepted Technology
In the gap left by ATM, VoFR has reached general
acceptance: Few
frame relay vendors now will consider selling a frame
relay access
device without voice capability. VoIP is the latest
wrinkle, and takes
into account the fact that, with the popularity of the
World Wide Web,
more than 70 percent of data in public networks is IP
protocol.
Andrew Voss, vice president of marketing at Nuera,
suggests that
although many equipment vendors are not
particularly excited about
VoIP, they will be compelled to include it to remain
competitive. Plus,
he explains, the technology is not difficult to add.
"More than 80
percent of technology is common technology - voice
compression or
silence suppression," he says.
Nuera, which already provides VoFR capability in its
AccessPlus frame
relay access devices, has added a VoIP gateway to
the product family.
Nuera is banking on the growth of packet voice,
Voss explains. The
company's newest gateway, the F50ip, is sold as a
low- cost entry level
system focused on small- to mid-sized corporate
offices. "The F50 is
not a cheap low-end box. It is our high-end product
software limited
to function as a low-end box," he says. Nuera is
confident enough in
the future of VoIP that it is willing to sell its new box
as a
loss-leader in the effort to gain market share.
Many VoIP products to date have been referred to
as "ham radio"
applications because users essentially throw their
voice onto the
Internet to see if they can get through, and to see
who responds.
Vendors that want to sell serious VoIP applications
find they need to
get past this perception of their products as toys.
Delta Three, Ericsson Show "Grown Up" IP
Telephony
Equipment vendor Ericsson [ERICY] has teamed
with service provider
Delta Three to develop what they claim is the first
commercial
implementation of VoIP technology. Their IP
Telephony solution for
Carriers (IPTC), officially unveiled in London late last
month, was
available for its first "ears-on test" at
NetWorld+Interop.
"This is true carrier-class [VoIP]," says Barbara
Boyle, global
marketing manager at Ericsson. "A lot of people
have been
experimenting and playing with VoIP. It's time to grow
up and play
with the big boys."
The two companies claim a latency of under 100 ms
for the ITPC
system. In addition, Delta Three maintains its service
quality by
routing the calls over a managed international IP
network, bypassing
the congested public Internet.
"You will begin seeing a dramatic expansion of
Internet telephony
services globally," says Kim Malone, executive vice
president of Delta
Three. "We will be marketing the product jointly with
Ericsson, [and]
Ericsson customers will be given the opportunity to
be Delta Three
network partners. This will make it much easier for
Ericsson to sell
the product because a gateway is obviously much
more useful if there is
a network on which to attach it."
She also expects that the partnership will
dramatically expand the
size of Delta Three's network, which currently serves
17 countries
around the world. The IPTC technology is already
installed and
operational for international calls between Israel, the
United Kingdom,
and the United States.
Carrier-scale VoIP is seen by many industry insiders
as the wave of
the future. "The ability to packetize voice makes
much more efficient
use of network infrastructure compared to switched
circuits," says
Stephen Von Rump, vice president, enterprise
services marketing at MCI
Communications [MCIC]. "And, despite what you
have heard, bandwidth is
still not free. If you can use a resource more
efficiently, there is
no question that this is an advantage," he adds.
Von Rump believes that all major voice switch
vendors are developing
products to packetize the traffic over the backbone.
He also believes
that one of the most cited advantages of packet
voice - lower
long-distance costs, especially in the international
market - is just
nothing more than a temporary phenomenon.
"If an Internet service provider (ISP) offers voice
services that are
transmitted over the public network and does not pay
access charges,
there will be a significant gap in cost between the
public switched
telephone network versus an IP connection.
However, market forces will
eventually force an equalization," Von Rump says.
"Will an ISP pay access charges, or will the local
exchange carriers
drop the charges? I don't know. But, I believe it will be
equalized,"
he says.
Even if the tariff cost advantages prove temporary, it
is possible
for a VoIP vendor to make a lot of money using this
short- term
tactical strategy. Also internationally, where the tariff
savings are
much greater, many years could pass before that
advantage disappears -
if it ever does.
Most players are in for the longer haul, however.
"They won't just
be making packet calls, customers will be looking for
all of the
services of the existing network," says Bill O'Shea,
president of
Lucent Technologies' [LU] Data Networking Systems
group.
"Today it is data overlaid on voice networks;
eventually it will be
voice riding on what are predominantly data
networks. Making that
conversion is billion of dollars of investment. It's a big
job," he
adds.
Applications to Drive Convergence
O'Shea sees the VoIP market moving from
packaged proprietary
systems to more open modular systems.
"Customers don't want to buy a
box, that's not the way people run networks," he
says, adding that open
systems will create a need for interoperability
standards.
John Shaw, vice president of marketing at NetCore
Systems, sees
computer/telephony integration as the possible driver
for VoIP in the
future. Telephony applications, such as call
management or message
management, could be running on PCs sooner rather
than later. "The
user interface on the PC will pull voice traffic onto IP
networks as
voice gets integrated with computers at application
level," he says.
(Barbara Boyle, Ericsson, ericsson.com,
972/583-5481; John
Callahan, Lucent Technologies,
lucent.com, 908/953- 5350;
Kim Malone, Delta Three, 212/588-3176; John
Shaw, NetCore Systems,
netcore.com 978/694-1555; Stephen Von
Rump, MCI,
mci.com, 972/498-1405; Andrew Voss,
Nuera,
nuera.com, 619/625-2400.)
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