BY RICH TEHRANI
Group Publisher

Telecom And IP Integration Is Snowballing

Advancements in telecommunications have evolved at a snail's pace for decades. Regulation, rather than technological innovation, has been responsible for almost all major advancements that telecom has enjoyed -- until recently. We can think of telecommunications technology today as a snowball. And finally, the telecom snowball has begun to increase its momentum as it rolls along the steepest slope any technology can encounter: The Internet.

Internet telephony is receiving more mainstream press than ever. In the last few weeks, I have an unusual amount of e-mail asking me for my opinion as to when all telecommunications will travel over the Internet or another Internet Protocol (IP) network.

This type of question is analogous to the amorphous "What is the meaning of life?" The simple truth is that no one can answer such an open-ended question. IP telephony has applications in corporate, home, and service provider markets, and adoption in any market depends on many factors.

Interestingly, nothing is new about transmitting telephony over a packet-based network such as the Internet. For almost a decade, companies like Micom (now Nortel Networks) made a nice business selling voice over frame relay switches allowing voice to ride packetized networks with no per-minute connection charge. Voice over ATM was also a hot technology for a while, and depending on whom you talk to, it still is. Frame relay and ATM do carry a considerable amount of voice traffic today and will continue to do so for a long while to come.

Although IP telephony is roughly analogous to both technologies above, it enjoys much wider coverage. Witness that TMC sponsors INTERNET TELEPHONY EXPO, an entire event dedicated to the convergence of voice, video, fax, and data networks. The Internet is certainly the most important change to come to telecommunications in history.

Why?

We can look to the rise of the personal computer for parallel reasons. The IBM PC became the hardware standard of choice, launching computing into the mainstream. Web browsers and Internet access extended this standard to include non-IBM computers. Internet Protocol is having the same effect on telecom.

Prior to the PC, developers were limited to choosing and developing for one hardware standard. Many software companies spent more of their time extending their core products across multiple platforms than they did developing them in the first place. Each computer had its own OS, and computers such as IBM even used different character sets than those of DEC and HP. UNIX helped this situation, but the PC really allowed developers to focus on the applications more than the porting. Developers also could depend on a much larger installed base when selling PC-based programs, so the incentive to develop for the PC became orders of magnitude greater than for any prior platform in history. A single programming standard, a huge installed base, and financial opportunities beyond imagination are what made the PC industry what it is today -- an environment conducive to rapid growth.

Let's return to IP: First used by UNIX and the Internet, it is now the worldwide networking standard. Once telephony moves to such a platform, it can become an open standard, with a huge installed base and financial opportunities beyond imagination. Does this sound familiar?

What excites me more than the opportunities inherent in the future is the immediate payback the technology provides today. In many applications for corporate users and service providers, IP telephony is significantly less expensive to implement and maintain than traditional telephony.

Then there are the enhanced services -- services that allow users to dramatically increase their productivity and efficiency while service providers receive reap regular returns. Internet fax, ISP Centrex, and Internet call waiting are just a few services that IP telephony brings to the service provider's table.

The corporate market can leverage IP telephony to provide a single line to the desktop, save considerably on long-distance calls, have video conferencing capabilities available for little additional cost, and drastically reduce its telecom infrastructure overhead.

Although we are still waiting for IP telephony standards to be settled (there are actually too many at the moment), there is considerable work being done today to facilitate this process. In the meantime, there is a huge installed base of IP equipment in the corporate and service provider environments to exploit, and the financial opportunities are beyond belief.

As the telecom snowball travels the steep slope of the Internet, it grows in size and picks up speed. The inevitable, and desirable, conclusion to its unstoppable journey is integration with the mountain it travels on: Telecom and Internet Protocol rolled together. Both the corporate and service provider markets will never be the same again.

Rich Tehrani welcomes comments at rtehrani@tmcnet.com.