Of course every packet should reach its destination, but some packets - specifically, packets associated with voice and video transmissions - demand real-time treatment. But how to ensure priority to packets associated with particular applications? How to selectively reduce latency and jitter to acceptably low levels? The key is enforcing Quality of Service (QoS). Moreover, QoS may figure into a variety of applications, including billing and service level enforcement applications, as well as applications that coordinate market segmentation and the enforcement of network policies. Attend this session, and understand the impact of QoS on application development.

IP Phones are increasingly critical elements of a modern enterprise communications strategy, as LAN-based telephony goes mainstream. The logic is compelling: If pushing intelligence to the PC was such a good idea in mainstream computing, why not in telephony? Why can't the phone itself run applications? A number of companies have created IP Phone reference designs and developed special development kits expressly for developers looking to create the next, killer IP telephony end-point device. This session will review and compare the latest offerings and help you make the right choice in enabling technology.

As a developer, you have many tools to choose from. There are hardware decisions to make, including selecting Digital Signal Processors (DSPs), ASICs, and other chip-level solutions, as well as software-related choices, including Board level APIs, application generators, JTAPI, and TAPI 3.0-based development tools. These resources all have their place on your workbench. Just as in any other profession, you can only be as productive as your tools allow you to be. Come learn about the latest Internet telephony development tools and decide which best suit the job at hand.

The IP telephony race is reaching full throttle. Enterprise adoption of VoIP products is rising rapidly. Service providers are expanding their offerings and scheduling new VoIP trials. Is the technology delivering on the faster, easier to manage, cheaper claims? Maybe. It is time for a reality check. Legacy performance expectation of users and providers is still a growth limiting issue.

Service providers and enterprises have made significant investments over the past few years in Web-based applications that provide content and service access to simplify or improve cost-effectiveness, access and efficiency. Being Web-based however, has limited these benefits to PC users. Extending such applications to voice or multimodal (data+voice) users from the more than 1.5 billion wireless phones and one billion wireline phones moves Web applications into a new realm of true anytime, anywhere access. The challenge is to cost-effectively extend these applications with a voice-enabled presentation mode. Many of the current solutions available require a complete rewriting of the application, business logic and data integration - a choice that greatly increases deployment, operations, application development, testing and maintenance costs. Come discover a new breed of solutions designed to overcome these cost burdens by utilizing existing applications and data integration already implemented for the Web to extend speech applications to mobile users.

Much of the buzz about IP telephony is focused on the tangible, visible elements of a solution: Handsets, adapters, IP phones, gateways, and the like. But what about the elements that make up the heart of any given solution? How important are the choices that developers need to consider at the processor level? Today’s voice processors are optimized to perform key functions such as echo cancellation, packetization, compression, and more. These specialized, high-density devices allow communications equipment providers to benefit like never before. Come to this session and see for yourself what you need to know about developing VoIP at the processor level.