BY RICH TEHRANI

Is it possible to under-hype a technology? In the case of Internet telephony, or IP telephony, I’d have to say yes. Absolutely yes. Other technologies — say, superconductors — may take center stage for a brief time, gracing the covers of Time and Newsweek. But IP telephony is so big, so profound, that hardly anyone can take in what it means. But we have to try to take IP telephony’s measure, especially now that TAPI 3.0 promises to hasten this technology’s ultimate triumph. IP telephony is the most important technology to ever enter the telecommunications market. Internet telephony takes telephony into the computer age by allowing circuit-switched telephone calls to become packetswitched, directly under computer control.

IP is the protocol that will allow video and voice to travel along the network with data. Once disparate networks can now be united with a common underlying protocol, allowing applications to be constructed easily and effectively. Furthermore, IP telephony will also facilitate the transport of voice calls and video on our Intranets and corporate data networks. Telecommuting office workers and call center agents — as well as videoondemand — are but a few of the potential applications of Internet telephony.

Brough Turner, Chief Technology officer at Natural Microsystems has stated that, “The computer market enjoys immense, regular gains in power and speed, which follow Moore’s law.” In 1965, Gordon Moore of Intel noted that the power and density of processors would roughly double every 18 months or so. His prediction has held true, much to our benefit, right through to the present day. Computers with 233MHz processors that would have been considered ridiculously fast just a few years back are now sold for just over $1,000. While the dollar per MIPS (million instructions per second) price of computers has been dropping rapidly, our phone rates have not been dropping at a proportionate rate. However, the digital signal processors (DSPs) that compress and decompress this telephony or voice traffic are enjoying the processing power increases of Moore’s law. This increased functionality will allow Internet telephony to revolutionize telecommunications and to decrease costs drastically.

ENTER TAPI 3.0
TAPI 3.0 — an architecture developed by Microsoft — provides simple and generic methods for making connections between two or more machines, and accessing media streams involved in that connection. It abstracts call-control functionality to allow different, and seemingly incompatible, communication protocols to expose a common interface to applications. TAPI 3.0 integrates multimedia stream control with legacy telephony. Additionally, it is an evolution of the TAPI 2.1 API to the COM model, allowing TAPI applications to be written in any language, such as JAVA, C/C++, and Microsoft’s Visual Basic programming system. COM is a component technology that provides a common object model for both local and network software integration and delivers a single, widely implemented standard, enabling applications from multiple vendors to integrate seamlessly over the Internet and corporate networks.

Besides supporting traditional telephony providers, TAPI 3.0 supports standard H.323 conferencing and IP multicast conferencing. TAPI 3.0 utilizes the Windows NT 5.0 Active Directory service to simplify deployment within an organization, and it supports quality of service (QoS) features to improve conference quality and network manageability. For more information on TAPI 3.0, consult page 120 of this issue.

TECHNOLOGY FACILITATORS
The technology facilitator is critical in unleashing the power of technology. Intel was critical in developing chips and motherboards that were supplied to vendors worldwide. These vendors, relieved of the burden of dedicating untold resources to chip fabrication, were able to focus on creating innovative, unique products while using common, offtheshelf processors. In this case, Intel is the facilitator, and the end users and PC companies are the benefactors. In much the same way that Intel facilitated a thriving PC market, Microsoft, with TAPI 3.0, is facilitating the development of Internet telephony programs to a developer audience that was only recently ill-equipped to handle the challenge.

According to Natural MicroSystems, programmers and developers currently qualified to write IP telephony applications number less than 10,000. TAPI 3.0 will make IP telephony available to the legions (3,000,000+) of Windows developers worldwide.

Dialogic’s Ravi Gururaj offered that, “Dialogic is strongly supportive of the TAPI 3.0 specification.” Dialogic’s position is that the transport independent nature of TAPI 3.0 — most notably the ability to support IP and PSTN networks — is a particularly strong benefit for both CT developers and deployers. Developers can use TAPI as a consistent interface to support multiple network interface protocols. For system administrators in the enterprise, this means that they can deploy common CTI communications applications on their IP and PSTN networks.

Standards
What has especially impressed me about the TAPI 3.0 information I have seen so far is the indication that Microsoft is committed to open standards more than ever with this release. H.323, the ITU standard for multimedia communications, is fully supported. Real-time Transport Protocol (RTP), the IETF standard designed to handle real time audio and video, is supported. Resource Reservation Protocol (RSVP), the IETF standard designed to support users’ bandwidth demands, is supported. All this underscores Microsoft’s commitment to supporting open standards.

Quality of Service
Perhaps one of the most overlooked items in the TAPI 3.0 announcement is the QoS awareness Microsoft is building into future operating systems. Coupling this awareness with the aforementioned emerging QoS standards will allow networks to more easily support QoS multimedia traffic.

UNIFIED NETWORKS
It makes little sense (if any) to have multiple cables delivered to each desktop with separate wiring closets for each. Don’t forget to add the cost for the actual media as well as the duplicate staffing required to handle both types of cables. Building QoS into the operating system allows the data network to carry voice traffic seamlessly. Although there are a great many challenges to overcome, it is clear that if you upgrade your LAN hubs and switches to take advantage of RTP and RSVP, TAPI 3.0 will enable your LAN to carry voice traffic.

To illustrate what this may mean to a typical office, we need to make a few assumptions. Let’s assume the average office uses a 10BASE-T LAN which has an average throughput of 400 KBPS (3,200 Kbps) and a maximum throughput of around 900 KBPS (7,200 Kbps). Assume an average IP telephony conversation consists of two 8-Kbps media streams (for a total of 16 Kbps). If you were to use your LAN for telephony only, you could conduct 7,200/16 = 450 simultaneous voice conversations on your LAN. Fifty simultaneous voice calls would consume just 100 KBPS or just 11 percent of your total LAN bandwidth.

WINDOWS NT 5.0 ACTIVE DIRECTORY INTEGRATION
A recurring problem with Internet telephony is that a user’s IP address can be dynamic, making it difficult to connect with the same user in a simple way. Currently, IP Telephony vendors are working on multiple ways of dealing with this type of problem.

To this end, Microsoft has integrated the Active Directory service of NT to provide user-to-IP address mapping. The directory is continuously updated with current information. There is a great likelihood that NT servers with Active Directory services will be the universal “white pages” of the future, allowing any Internet telephony user to seamlessly connect to any other user. NT 5.0 gateway server presence within ISPs will provide the infrastructure to help make this a reality.

TAPI 3.0 will allow Internet telephony technology to enter the mainstream. Legions of developers, once overwhelmed with the difficulty of developing Internet telephony applications, will be able to integrate this technology into their current and future applications seamlessly. The user community as a whole will gain, as more choices become available to them that will allow them to take control of their telecommunications and take advantage of Moore’s Law.

Sincerely,
Rich Tehrani
Publisher, CTI magazine

At CTI EXPO (Baltimore, MD, May 19–22, 1998), we will have an entire exhibit pavilion devoted to Internet telephony. In addition to the many vendors displaying Internet telephony software and gateways, there will be Web and call center integration vendors showcasing the technology that allows users to click on a “call me” button on a Web site and either receive a call back or connect live through Internet telephony.

Additionally, there will be two Technology Learning Centers on the exhibit floor. One of these Learning Centers will be located in the Internet telephony pavilion and will showcase approximately 10 leading Internet telephony vendors who will objectively demonstrate the technology behind their products. These Learning Centers are designed to be highly educational and devoid of commercialism. They are provided as a service to the attendees who deserve to be educated about the latest technologies in an unbiased, professional environment.

Finally, CTI EXPO will feature a conference track rich in Internet telephony topics that will allow anyone to quickly master the technologies and understand the impact of Internet telephony on their company. Developers and resellers will also benefit from these conference tracks as they learn how best to take advantage of this new technology. Some key sessions at the conference include:

• Voice, video, and data convergence.
• Voice over data networks.
• Understanding emerging standards of Internet telephony.
• Collaborative computing.
• Internet telephony gateways: dramatic long-distance savings.
• Internet telephony: telecom industry reaction and response.
• Save money through Internet faxing.
• Security and firewalls.
• Future quality of service (QoS) options.
• Become an alternative telecom carrier.

Product of the Year Award

Overwhelming requests from our readers have led us to institute CTI magazine’s first-ever Product of the Year awards. This promises to be the industry’s first truly objective award program, as the engineers at CTI Labs will carefully scrutinize each applicant. We invite all vendors to fill out the application form on page 125 of this issue and fax it in, or see our Web site at www.ctimag.com/cti/award.htm to apply online. The deadline for applications is November 21, 1997. The results of our selection process will appear in the February, 1998 issue of CTI.