Elliot Devine 14:59, 29 Oct 2004 (EST) IP_Telephony
ENTRY 4: http://www.ipendpoints.com/IP%20Endpoint%20Articles.htm
Voice over IP (VoIP) defines a way to carry voice calls over an IP network including the digitization and packetisation of the voice streams. IP Telephony utilizes the VoIP standards to create a telephony system where higher level features such as advanced call routing, voice mail, contact centres, etc., can be utilized.The most significant benefit of IPT and driver of its evolution is money-saving and easy implementation of innovative services:
• Now, customers may take advantage of flat Internet rating vs. hierarchical PSTN rating and save money while letting their long-distance calls be routed over Internet. This is especially true in Europe, where the prices of long-distance calls are still higher than in US. But: according to some estimation, the prices of the traditional and the Internet telephony will equalize together with the convergence of quality of services provided by them.
• The IPT users may also profit of its software-oriented nature: software solutions may be easily extended and integrated with other services and applications, e.g. white boarding, electronic calendar, or WWW. Deployment of new IP telephony services requires significantly lower investment in terms of time and money than in the traditional PSTN environment.
• In the future, Internet Telephony Service Providers (ITSP) may use a single infrastructure for providing both, Internet access and Internet telephony. Only data-oriented switches could be deployed for switching data as well as packetized voice. Multiplexing data and voice could also result in better bandwidth utilization than in today's over-engineered voice-or-nothing links. Not only the providers, but also their clients will profit of lower costs eventually.
The wide business deployment is still hindered by lower quality of voice over IP, particularly by higher delay and jitter. Also many technical aspects of accounting, billing, charging, roaming etc. remain open yet. THE FUTURE OF IP:
Making predictions is difficult and it belongs to the competence area of oracles, magicians and marketing managers. But let us at least summarize some important factors.
An article has been published by Communications Industry Researchers, which claimed the “prices of the traditional and the Internet telephony will equalize as soon as the quality of the both standards will do so�. The most significant obstacle in reaching the equilibrium is still unsatisfactory voice quality. However, the voice quality will increase with increasing bandwidth. You may not know it, but you've probably already used a version of VOIP. Many office phone systems send calls through digital switches before kicking them out to the traditional phone network, and some long-distance carriers route calls through chunks of the Internet to save themselves money.
Today industry competitors have improved call quality considerably. The latest advances are "Internet phones," appliances that plug into a phone jack. Such devices, like the Aplio/Phone, eliminate the need for a computer altogether for folks who might cringe at talking to their beige desktops all day. (Internet phones are hardly perfect yet: both the Aplio caller and the call's recipient must have an Aplio/ Phone, for instance, in order for the call to go through.)
