The telecommunications industry has gone through many changes over the past one hundred years. Nothing has impacted the way we do business or how we will be communicating as the introduction of IP Telephony.

Definition: Internet telephony (IPT) is transport of telephone calls over the Internet, no matter whether traditional telephony devices, multimedia PCs or dedicated terminals take part in the calls and no matter whether the calls are entirely or only partially transmitted over the Internet.

IP Telephony comes in many different flavors and can be categorized as follows: · IP Telephone systems which may or may not communicate on a customers LAN or WAN · IP Telephony which allows an individual or business to make calls over the Internet

IP Telephone Systems:

The market leaders providing IP Telephony are Avaya, Cisco, and Nortel. Each is spending most of their efforts on continuing to improve the technology and see this as the future in telecommunications.

These devices have a tremendous amount of flexibility in the business environment and are being implemented to help companies reduce costs, increase productivity and network multiple sites together. One application allows a home-based employee to be tied to the phone system at corporate. Home based workers no longer need to pay for additional lines to the house, have an independent voice mail or expense calls made to home accounts.

With IP Telephony, the issue of distance is no longer a factor. Multiple sites can transfer calls seamlessly, or call centers can run from site to site throughout the country.

IP Network Solutions:

Carriers today are moving to IP Backbones to handle voice traffic. This will significantly lower the cost of transport that will mean even lower costs for consumers in the years to come. Carriers are working hard to implement this technology and have made strides over the years, however obstacles still exist in this environment.

The biggest issue is quality of calls over the public Internet today. Consumers are still facing issues such as jitter or latency in the voice call. Consumers are used to a certain level of quality when using traditional voice services from carriers and when faced with poor quality issues the savings do not outweigh the possibility of a call not completing or dropping.

The other major hurdle is security and emergency 911 services. Many of the carriers today have been unable to implant a solution to allow these services to ride on true VoIP calls and until this is solved many organizations cannot implement these types of services.

Summary:

IP Telephony is here to stay and the solution providers along with Network Service providers are placing a significant amount of resources to ensure the release of new services is well received in the marker place. Companies large and small who are evaluating VoIP technologies need to seriously evaluate the technology available today and how it can impact their business for years to come.

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