Digital Common Sense

IP Telephony Demystified - A McGraw-Hill book  (ISBN# 0071406700 )

Every business in the world uses telecommunications, but this technology has introduced an incredible number of problems as well. Business telephony ranges from the small office with one or two phone lines, to large campus environments with multiple PBXs linked together, and every possible permutation in between.

In today’s market, essentially everyone uses the Internet as a business tool. We’ve heard the term convergence bandied about in many ways, but in essence, we speculate the feasibility and reality of integrating all services, voice, data and video, onto a single network infrastructure. This level of convergence, while possible, is for many companies, not practical today.What may be practical, and even profitable, is integrating voice and data onto a single IP infrastructure. Initially, the perceived benefit of this was reduced toll and long distance charges. Over time, as the wireless market has grown, we’ve seen long distance costs reduced significantly over the past few years.<>

Today the sensible use for IP telephony may be integration of services. Integrating voice and data can provide cost savings by reducing the overhead, in both equipment and talent, required to provide these two mission-critical services. Beyond that, integration of voice and data leads to new services and customer service offerings that are only beginning to be explored. The voice-enabled call center is merely the tip of the “integration iceberg.” We must integrate in order to innovate, and IP telephony presents an area in technology where we have all the tools within our grasp to succeed.This book will explore both the business concepts and the technologies at levels that will help both business managers and technologists make intelligent and informed decisions about why IP telephony might provide value to their companies. All too often technology books explore the bit level detail of a technology without explaining why the reader should know or care about the core technology. We will dive into the technology in several areas and uncover the underlying importance of both the technology and how it can be implemented.
The telecommunications providers of the world have often been slow to migrate to new technologies, and IP telephony is no different. We might consider both IP telephony and xDSL as disruptive technologies. The DSL market has seen many failures as the CLECs tried to compete and found both technical and business impediments to success. The ILECs individually chose either the explore or ignore approach, but failed to embrace DSL as a profitable and desirable market segment. This diluted the success of DSL and contributed to numerous CLEC failures.

IP telephony has a fundamental difference from DSL. For DSL to succeed, the telecommunications service providers had to do something different than they had previously been doing. The Telecommunications Act of 1996 and the issues surrounding the unbundled local loop required fundamental changes in the mindset of the telcos in order for DSL to succeed. IP telephony on the other hand, can succeed in the market even if the telcos continue to operate the way they always have and change nothing. Because IP telephony is a service riding over existing transport technologies, readily available, new companies can enter the market without concerted efforts by the telcos to help make the technology a success. In this regard, IP telephony is a true disruptive technology in that, if ignored by the incumbents, it can grow to overwhelm the existing technology base.