[Vendor support moves IP telephony standard forward]
infoworld.com
A raft of vendors, including 3Com, Cisco Systems, GRIC Communications, iPass, and TransNexus, have thrown their support behind a proposed IP telephony standard called the Open Settlement Protocol (OSP), which they believe will help drive demand and deployment of IP telephony. Other major players, as well as analysts, applauded the effort and agreed it has the potential to advance the technology into the mainstream.
"It's a simple protocol, enabling different carriers to have interdomain communication, allowing them to authenticate a call, authorize it, and set up accounting information that will include call-detail records, for example," said Tricia Baker, manager of business development at Cisco, in San Jose, Calif.
Jim Dalton, CEO and president of TransNexus, in Atlanta, added that "What is not defined yet is how networks will interoperate in commercial terms -- a way for networks to exchange information about how to share revenue when they exchange traffic."
According to Baker and Dalton, a working group of the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) has approved the protocol, and vendors will be trialing OSP within 12 months. OSP is part of the ETSI Telecommunications and IP Harmonization over Network project, chartered to establish global standards for Internet telephony. OSP still needs to go through a final ratification process, but Dalton said that most likely only minor changes are left to be made. OSP is not scheduled for submission to the International Telecommunication Union or the Internet Engineering Task Force.
Dalton said the main benefits of OSP include it confidentiality of information via Secure Sockets Layer encryption; secure, mutual authentication of communicating parties through public and private key cryptography methods; nonrepudiation of all communications through digital signature technology, so that, for example, a receiving party has verification that another party used their network; and information exchange via Extensible Markup Language.
Other key players such as Lucent Technologies and Northern Telecom expressed interest and support of IP telephony standards in general but are still evaluating OSP, company representatives said.
But others such as Ascend Communications, GTE, AT&T, and Internet Telephony Exchange Carrier (ITXC) -- although not part of the formal OSP announcement made this month -- expressed their support. Sprint and MCI WorldCom were unavailable for comment.
"OSP is critical for leading Internet telephony providers like GTE," said Shawn Wiora, program manager for enhanced IP telephony at GTE, in Irving, Texas. "There's a growing trend of multinational communications and a growing expectation by consumers for global roaming for voice over IP."
"Settlement is a key place for interoperability to move forward," said Oleh Danyluk, marketing director for IP telephony at AT&T, which launched its own settlement service in April. "It's the only way to communicate with hundreds of countries around the world with our network."
Tom Evslin, CEO at ITXC -- which uses technology from iPass to also provide IP telephony "broker" services -- said "we're 100 percent behind [OSP]," adding that "we have to be at least as interoperable, if not more so, than the PSTN."
Analysts also commended the OSP effort.
"By major companies coming together and supporting a single way of performing authentication, settlement, this will allow businesses to feel more comfortable with their selection of a provider," said Tom Jenkins, an analyst at TeleChoice, in Boston. "No provider can be everywhere today, so this will allow them to offer more transparent services and a greater geographic range."
"There's no reason [for a vendor] not to be behind it," said Chris Nicoll, an analyst at Current Analysis, in Sterling, Va. "This will help acceptance of VOIP as a mainline technology." |
