VoIP on the verge: with incumbents and new entrants alike capturing residential market share, VoIP is on the threshold of something big

Telecommunications Americas, Nov, 2004 by Jon Arnold

SB: Everywhere you look there seems to be a new VoIP service provider emerging. What's your take on these players?

MK: You have a lot of good companies such as Net2Phone and Level 3. On the other side you have the cable industry and the wireline companies working with wireless guys to take advantage of VoIP to allow businesses to bundle services over PDAs and Wi-Fi. The commonality between all these service providers is IP. Voice is an application taking advantage of this IP infrastructure. We're going through an evolution where it does not matter whether you are a telephone company, cable company, wireless operator or a satellite provider--everyone wants a bundle of services. Voice is like a utility service, and the Internet is sitting right next to it. So, how do you integrate these two things? VoIP is the ideal application for it.

SB: The IPCC developed six working group initiatives. What are these working groups looking to accomplish?

MK: We built a project working group to prioritize and solve VoIP issues. Service providers came to us and said: 'There are no guidelines for VoIP peering.' We put a number of service providers and members together to draft guidelines, and that draft will be ready by the end of this year and in Q1 2005 we will publish it. The second issue was session border control. What does it mean, what is the value proposition, and how do SBCs work with various softswitches and gateways, no matter the brand or protocol. We paired SBC vendors with the service provider members in a working group to define all aspects of this in a format of the guidelines.

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SB: How real is the momentum for VoIP?

MK: Initially, VoIP was designed for offloading Internet traffic, and then it was used for Class 4 long-haul sitting on top of frame relay and ATM using different QoS elements. Then, with all of the network upgrades to fiber, it was easier to use VoIP from point A to point B by using a different codec, which cut traditional 56 kbps bandwidth for voice down to 32 kbps. Then, the industry came up with the idea of offering enhanced services. Traditionally, a PBX would sit in your building and the telephone companies said they could do the PBX functions remotely via Centrex. An emerging group of third-party service providers such as Telverse or GoBeam said they could do all of this and more with IP Centrex. Now, the cable companies want to offer voice service to residential over either a primary-line or secondary-line connection. When you are in the primary-line business, regardless if you are a cable company or a telephone company, you have to meet E911 operator assistance and other traditional requirements. Companies that just focus on offering E911 such as TCS, which designed E911 for cellular companies, offer a similar concept for VoIP. The solutions are there, and in 2006, we're going to see a lot of VoIP deployments. The value proposition of VoIP is not to replace traditional TDM, which improves network efficiency, but rather in delivering new services.