Jerry Skene
(ITU 000012)
ITU-T* Rapporteur for studies on voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) gateways, and Standards Director at Tellabs, Inc.
Jerry Skene
(ITU 000012)
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* Telecommunication Standardization Sector of the ITU. |
We are all aware of the impact that the Internet, through the World Wide Web, has had on our daily business and personal lives. This article will briefly examine the impact this technology is likely to have on traditional telephone services, and ITU's role in this area.
Electronic mail (e-mail) and the Web have made the world a different place, both from a business and a social perspective, allowing us through e-mail and our Web browser to stay in touch in a much more frequent and timely manner with our office, customers and family
Electronic mail (e-mail) and the Web have made the world a different place, both from a business and a social perspective, allowing us through e-mail and our Web browser to stay in touch in a much more frequent and timely manner with our office, customers and family. Many of us shop online now without having physically to buy goods and services. An increasing number of traditional services, such as home mortgages, real estate and insurance are in the process of being completely transformed by e-business. Systems and information flow are being made much more efficient, comparison pricing is an order of magnitude easier, and the ultimate price to the consumer of many services is dropping.
While this revolution is making major changes in many areas of business and life in general for much of the world, the Web has yet to have much impact on most of our telephone service. This, however, is about to change.
Voice over Internet protocol, or VoIP for short, will be responsible for this change. VoIP is a rapidly developing technical standard, in which the ITU is playing a major role, that allows the existing Internet, public and private data networks to carry telephone calls. By converting normal speech to data packets, VoIP enables voice to be transported and switched efficiently along with data that is already being carried by the Internet.
In its early days, before international standards were in place, VoIP technology was used mainly as a hobbyist's curiosity. Speech quality was poor and had considerable echo, there was no standardized method of finding the remote party's address, and both parties had to use specially configured personal computers with identical IP telephony software. It was very inexpensive though, in many cases free, and so was attractive for a small segment of users from an arbitrage perspective compared to the high long-distance tariffs in place at the time.
Much has changed, however, in the four or five years since the first VoIP systems were introduced. The ITU, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), and the European Telecommunications Standardization Institute (ETSI) have been busy solving these, and many more issues through global standards. Within the ITU, several study groups are involved in developing VoIP standards, and several questions are dedicated solely to ensuring that global standards are in place for such things as high-quality speech coders, universal addressing, voice gateway characteristics, call control, signalling, etc. What these standards have done is to establish VoIP as a legitimate, fully functional service offering, with a multitude of hardware, software and service providers ready to fulfil the market demand. And there is market demand.
NTT calculates that in 1998, there were 240 million minutes of IP telephony traffic. They estimate that by 1999 this had grown over tenfold to 2.5 billion minutes. Frost & Sullivan estimates that VoIP traffic will be 2.7 trillion minutes in 2006, making up 25 per cent of all telephone traffic. Phillips Tarifica Ltd. estimates that VoIP will be 43 per cent of international traffic by 2003
As has happened in the past with several other telecommunication technologies, such as the fax machine, the 56K modem, and the cell phone, when global standards are fully in place, there soon follows an enormous increase in the size of the market. If forecasts are accurate about the size of the VoIP market, it will begin to have a significant effect on the traditional telephony market. NTT calculates that in 1998, there were 240 million minutes of IP telephony traffic. They estimate that by 1999 this had grown over tenfold to 2.5 billion minutes. Frost & Sullivan estimates that VoIP traffic will be 2.7 trillion minutes in 2006, making up 25 per cent of all telephone traffic. Phillips Tarifica Ltd. estimates that VoIP will be 43 per cent of international traffic by 2003. While it is always difficult making predictions, especially about the future, these numbers suggest that VoIP has already moved well beyond the trial phase.
In China, for example, the Ministry of Information Industry has recently approved IP telephony as a legitimate service offering. One operator sold over one million prepaid VoIP calling cards in its first few months of business, and the carrier China Unicom has announced access to over 300 cities through its VoIP network. Several traditional carriers in other parts of the world also have extensive VoIP service offerings, including AT&T, MCIWorldCom, NTT and BT.
There are several characteristics of VoIP networks that seem to justify this degree of interest. VoIP is a so-called next generation network that uses a radically different network architecture than that of the traditional switched circuit network. While the arbitrage advantage has been greatly diminished by a drop in long-distance tariffs in most regions, VoIP still has fundamentally lower platform and maintenance costs, and a much faster time to market than switched circuit network systems do. VoIP lends itself very well to new service offerings, such as "click to talk", where you click on a website link and your phone rings or your PC connects as a telephone, having been called through an IP connection by the information or goods provider whose Web page you are browsing. Innumerable new services are being dreamed up constantly, and are usually put into place in a few weeks rather than the years it typically takes the traditional public switched telephone network (PSTN) to roll out new services.
We have seen that new Web applications can increase business productivity as well as generate a whole new type of economy as has happened in the United States, and a little later but just as convincingly, in Europe. It appears that VoIP, with its new range of service offerings that are able to fully integrate voice and data, can also be helpful in improving a country's economy
As has been true in the past with traditional telecommunications, a comprehensive telecommunication network infrastructure is essential for national economic growth. We have seen that new Web applications can increase business productivity as well as generate a whole new type of economy as has happened in the United States, and a little later but just as convincingly, in Europe. It appears that VoIP, with its new range of service offerings that are able to fully integrate voice and data, can also be helpful in improving a country's economy. While it is usually the more developed economies that are first to market such new services, developing economies may benefit from VoIP even more, as it can have a lower cost of entry, and, being new, does not give anyone an incumbent's advantage.
The nature and culture of the Internet is such that it attracts many of the brightest and most creative minds, as evidenced by the explosive growth in Web development tools and applications. Through VoIP, this same force is now being applied to the global telephone market. Computer programmers are now becoming telecommunication programmers, and there are a lot of computer programmers out there.
Call quality within VoIP has now improved to the point where in many cases it is indistinguishable from that provided by the PSTN. Quality echo cancellers conforming to ITU-T Recommendation G.168 remove echo, better speech codecs described by ITU-T Recommendation H.323 standard improve speech quality, and common protocols such as H.248, jointly developed by ITU and IETF help ensure end-to-end interoperability.
What started out as an experiment with new technology has now become a fully legitimate, global business with a very promising future. There is, however, an enormous investment in traditional PSTN systems, including not only the switches and infrastructure hardware, but also the service, maintenance and network management functions. It will be some time before VoIP networks evolve to this same level of service, if indeed they ever do. Through careful grafting of the two systems, and the development of interoperability and quality of service standards, however, ITU can help ensure that the best of both worlds is available to all.