Vendor support moves IP telephony standard forward
September 10, 1998
InfoWorld Electric via NewsEdge Corporation : 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."
[FAC note: The following paragraph nullifies my previous observation about Evslin's conspicuous absence in prior releases on this subject.]
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." |
