Elliot Devine 14:59, 29 Oct 2004 (EST) IP_Telephony
ENTRY 3: http://www.cse.ohio-state.edu/~jain/refs/ref_voip.htm#books
“Migrate to IP or be left behind�
This seems to be the idea in the minds of vendors who have been using circuit switch infrastructures for the transportation of voice. With the introduction of IP telephony the internet is being modified to support voice traffic and products are being made to link data and voice networks. Eventually the Internet and telephone network will be one and the same.
However, Internet telephony is an emerging technology and like any other new technology it has a number of technological and evolutionary issues. The technological issues are mainly because the Internet was not designed for real time traffic such as voice and video.
The evolutionary issues arise from the variety of vendors developing their products according to market demands and supplies. It will take time for all these products to converge and work with the same reliability as the circuit switch network.
However, the public Internet will be able to handle voice and video services quite reliably within the next three to five years, once two critical changes take place:
• an increase by several orders of magnitude in backbone bandwidth and access speeds, stemming from the deployment of IP/ATM/synchronous optical network (SONET) and ISDN, cable modems, and x digital subscriber line (xDSL) technologies, respectively
• the tiering of the public Internet, in which users will be required to pay for the specific service levels they require
The benefits of using IP as a generic platform for both data and real time applications are compelling enough to encourage resolution of these issues. VOIP is growing fast; the very knowledge of the applications of this technology is enough for users and manufacturers to flock towards it. It is ideal for computer based communications and at the same time bringing down the cost of multimedia transfer.
