Open the door to telephony's future - Technology Information

Communications News , Sept, 2000 by Bryan Pelham

Innovation depends on standards promoting Internet voice services.
A revolution is taking place today in telephony that mirrors the Internet revolution of the past decade. Slowly, but surely, carriers are building out a converged voice/data infrastructure that will foster an explosion in new telephony services and applications. To achieve full voice/data convergence, open standards will be needed, standards that are supported by everyone in the voice/data food chain, from carriers and service providers to businesses and consumers. These standards are emerging quickly, and now is the time to plan for them.
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To foster innovation in telephony networks, all parties must work together to transform the public switched telephone network (PSTN) from a closed, proprietary system optimized for voice delivery into a converged voice/data network based on open standards. Today, PSTN delivery platforms, such as Class 5 switches, are built on proprietary architectures, and years are needed to deploy new features on these architectures.
In addition, carriers deploy PSTN switches from various vendors, each with its own proprietary way of implementing features--impeding the smooth, uniform rollout of services. For example, caller ID, three-way calling and call return have been technically possible for many years, but these and other features have been painfully slow to appear, due to lack of standardization. As a result, carriers have difficulty performing across-the-board software and feature upgrades needed to offer a service universally.
In contrast, the use of Internet standards for the deployment of voice services will enable the same kind of rapid innovation for telephony that is occurring on the Internet today. Just 10 years ago, few people had even heard of the Internet, but today those same people wonder how they could live without it. The Internet touches lives on a daily basis--either directly as e-mail is sent or received, as company Web sites are explored, or as people check their investment portfolios; or indirectly when goods and services are purchased from companies that rely on Internet standards to conduct business.
In the telecommunications industry, the following Internet standards are taking root:
* The media gateway control protocol (MGCP) and the newer media gateway control protocol (MEGACO) are used for controlling voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) gateways from external call control agents. These protocols assume a call-control architecture where the call-control "intelligence" is outside the gateways and handled by external call-control agents.
* The session initialization protocol (SIP) is an application-layer control (signaling) protocol used between intelligent devices for creating, modifying and terminating sessions with one or more participants. SIP is designed to be independent of the lower-layer transport protocol and can be extended with additional capabilities.
* Although not an Internet standard, the H.323 protocol has also been widely deployed to build VoIP networks. H.323 is also an application-layer control protocol used between intelligent devices for managing sessions with other multimedia end points.
Voice and data networks will converge around the IP standard, as well as a host of other Internet standards for multimedia applications, such as IPtelephony and streaming video. Incumbent and competitive carriers alike are aggressively moving to IP and softswitch technologies that will enable them to implement new features quickly through a single, cost-effective network.
With the carriers moving toward convergence, network managers should also begin planning for voice/data network integration around IP. Information analysts at Phillips Group-Info Tech estimate that nearly 90% of enterprises with multiple locations will begin migrating from the circuit-switched public switched telephone network (PSTN) to packet-based telephony over the next five years.
THE PROMISE OF CONVERGENCE
The benefits of voice/data convergence accrue across the board, from the carrier network to the customer premises:
* Lower capital equipment costs. Companies and carriers will lower their infrastructure and management costs with a single, integrated voice/data network infrastructure. Telephone and data equipment is increasingly becoming integrated. For example, many companies are replacing multiple voice and data devices with integrated communications platforms (ICPs) that provide a multitude of services in one box.
* Lower maintenance costs. By merging voice and data networks, carriers and businesses reduce management requirements and personnel needs by supporting only one converged network, instead of separate voice and data networks. Business customers also reduce administrative overhead with only one provider relationship to maintain.
* Better bandwidth usage. Circuit-switched voice networks frequently waste available bandwidth because voice lines sit idle for a significant portion of each day. By using a packet-based network for telephony transport, carriers and companies can reduce costs by leveraging unused and expensive wide area network bandwidth for data services. For example, idle voice bandwidth can be used for large overnight data transfers or backups.

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