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face="Times New Roman"> Krishna G Murti, vice-president, technology for Elemedia, Bell Labs. |
Over the last several years,
Internet has undergone a dramatic change. What started in the late Sixties as a research
tool for government and academia, and later a means to exchange E-mail and files, has
grown to become a major force in people’s lives. Now the Net is used for an amazing
variety of applications ranging from advertising, call centres, and help desks, to
entertainment, education, electronic commerce, and even telephony.
The range of applications is currently
limited by technology, both in the "backbone", or core part of the network, and
in the end-points. These limitations are rapidly being overcome and soon we can expect an
even richer set of capabilities. Of all the new and evolving uses for the Net, the most
promising long-term opportunity is interactive multimedia communication. Much of the
recent interest in Internet, particularly from the service providers, is its potential for
offering rich and diverse communication services.
The IP network today is an excellent
medium for delivering non-realtime data such as E-mail, data files, and even fax. With
little change, except for increased capacity, the current network would continue to serve
us well for traditional applications. However, emerging applications are placing
significant demands on both the network backbone and the periphery (access networks as
well as endpoints). Improvements are required in multiple areas.
Standards bodies such as the IETF, ITU,
IMTC, and ETSI are addressing issues such as interoperability, efficiency, Quality of
Service (QoS), security, and increased functionality through their work on IPv6, H.323,
IPsec, and related protocols. Service providers are addressing backbone capacity, access
bandwidth, and interworking with traditional networks (e.g., PSTN, wireless, ISDN) through
the deployment of high-speed routers, gateways, and new access networks supporting
technologies such as V.90, xDSL, and cable modems. In addition, equipment providers and
application developers are addressing issues such as complexity, cost, and ease-of-use.
face="Times New Roman">The IP network today is an excellent medium for delivering |
The first Internet Protocol (IP)-based
telephony application emerged a couple of years ago and literally started a new industry.
The initial product was difficult to use and required co-ordination or advanced scheduling
since both parties in the conversation had to have their PCs on, connected to the Net, and
running the same application. Nevertheless, it did support voice communications over the
Net, albeit with poor voice quality and inconvenient call set-up.
IP telephony has since moved from the
realm of hobbyists to something that is revolutionizing the telecom industry. This
revolution is being fueled by many of the items cited above—interoperability through
standards, improved network performance, improved performance of applications, and
interworking with traditional devices such as telephones through the use of gateways. The
latter capability is perhaps the most significant in terms of accelerating the growth and
interest in IP telephony. IP telephony gateways provide instant connectivity to the
millions of installed telephones in the PSTN.
Other services will include
videoconferencing and white-boarding. The combination of these new services will enable
the true driving force behind IP telephony—richer services and true multimedia
communication.
IP telephony will continue to evolve,
becoming more reliable, cheaper, and providing more flexibility than the current PSTN. The
gateway functionality will gradually be integrated into a wide range of devices such as
PBXes, switches, routers, mobile systems, and remote access servers. This migration will
be facilitated by today’s movement of intelligence from the Gateways into other
network entities, network management systems, and operation support systems.
However, the adoption of standards and
resultant interoperability are critical for this evolution to occur.
The window of opportunity for new
innovative services is opening up. It will be easier, faster, and cheaper to offer
innovative services in the IP telephony environment than in the traditional
circuit-switched environment. New services will arise from the innovation that is
traditionally associated with Internet. Customers will benefit because the new services
will not only be richer but can more easily be tailored to their particular needs.
In the not too distant
future, the range of applications will be limited only by our imagination rather than
technologist’s ability to deliver. The Net will evolve to be the universal
communications medium. n
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