ll technology, there is a price to be paid, and several entities vying for a piece of the pie. WHAT IS VoIP and HOW DOES IT WORK? To put it simply, VoIP means Voice over Internet Protocol. It’s a technology that allows network managers to route phone call over the network they use for data transmission. A voice travels over a corporate Intranet or the Internet instead of the public telephone system. Special gateways installed at both the sending and receiving end of a communications channel converts voice to IP packets and back again to voice. This process must take place in a time frame of less than 100 milliseconds to sustain the Quality of Service (QoS) that users are accustomed to from the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN). Now let’s take a walk on the more detailed side of what VoIP is and how it works. First and foremost, VoIP is an emerging technology still in the early stages. A personal computer (PC) must capture an analog voice and convert it to a digital signal, compress the audio with a compression-decompression (codec) device and then move it into the IP protocol stack. The codecs are at the heart of any IP telephony software. It is an algorithm that transforms analogue signals into digital ones and vice versa. The next step is to access the network, which is the premise modem connected to the PSTN and channeled to the Internet Service Provider (ISP) modem. The next link in the chain of events is the IP network itself or the Internet. The current structure of the Internet can make it an unstable and unpredictable carrier. Finally, the voice packet must transition back from the IP network to the PSTN, to the receivers’ modem for conversion back into analog. Each of these steps adds more delay to the voice packets. A delay approximately of over 550 milliseconds, which is 400 msecs over the QoS acceptable limit, is found to occur. These delays and other issues are just some of the challenges facing the future of VoIP. WHY IS VoIP AN ISSUE? Between 1994 and 1997 ISP revenue grew from about $189 million to over $4.75 billion dollars, making it the telecommunications success story of the nineties. This extraordinary growth, coupled with relatively inexpensive connectivity for the typical user has helped drive the emergence of VoIP. To the typical personal user, this technology will mean nothing more than the ability to make “free” long distance phone calls. However, to the business world, this technology holds some very profound promises. It’s the ability to avoid long distance phone charges that has many scrambling to control the future of VoIP. Companies ranging from the traditional common carriers to the newer next generation telcos are all scrapping for a share of this lucrative market. The VoIP portion of this emerging market is expected to grow at a rate of 149 percent annually through 2001 to about $1.89 billion dollars with high estimates of $9.4 billion by 2002. With this much money and revenue at stake, local and state governments, which derive millions of dollars from taxing voice carriers, are also taking notice of this emerging, unregulated threat. Another issue of this technology is the fact that there has yet to be a standardized set of protocols for the manufacturers and vendors. This is leading to proprietary hardware and software, which all leads to incompatibility and increased expense. As with all technologies and advances, the bottom line is the dollar. These are just a few of the many issues facing global ado

Some topics in this essay:
DISADVANTAGES VoIP, VoIP Companies, Bell Companies, WorldCom Sprint, HTTP H323, VoIP ISSUE, Network PSTN, Provider ISP, Emerging Internet, MCI WorldCom, internet protocol, ip network, voice internet, level 3, voice internet protocol, ip based, control protocol, gateway control, traditional phone, bell companies, gateway control protocol, regional bell, regional bell companies, traditional phone system, ip network pstn,