Voice over Ip (voip)

In today's technological society there's the presence of an increasingly popular networking phenomenon called convergence. Convergence is using of an integrated infrastructure in a business to support voice, data, and even video applications. According to Jill Thelen "The Convergence of Telecommunication, media, and computers is obviously a source of profits for businesses" (p.16) and that is one of the major reason businesses are looking forward for this technology to work further more.

Piping Voice and data over IP (VoIP) the same network could save users big money and improve operations in a company but a very handful companies are giving it a try. Instead the traditional distinct companies are coming together and merging their voice and data over IP networks, this allows them to focus more on information rather than how they access it. At this state many large companies are coming together with this new technology of convergence.

Voice over IP (VoIP):

Internet telephony refers to communications services of voice, facsimile, and/or voice-messaging applications. They are transported via the Internet, rather than the traditional public switched telephone network (PSTN). The basic steps involved in originating an Internet telephone call are conversion of the analog voice signal to digital format and compression/translation of the signal into Internet protocol (IP) packets for transmission over the Internet; the process is reversed at the receiving end.

Let's further look at VoIP as many of today's Internet Service Providers along with other companies are taking more and more interest in this hot telecommunications tool. In order to understand Voice over IP better, we need to compare it with the traditional PSTN. First of all, while PSTN is only designed for voice, through the Internet a company benefits through packetized data, voice, and video. This means that a company has the luxury of all these things with just one single IP, thereby, eliminating the necessity of getting these different services by separate providers. Secondly, let's take a look at the cost of each service. For Internet telephony, there is most likely a monthly flat rate for access while the PSTN has per-minute charges for long distance, monthly flat rate for local access. This could also be beneficial since with the ISP, a customer is just paying one flat rate for everything not just voice, yet also eliminating inconvenience of paying two different bills/rates for international and local access. Thirdly, they both differ from the connection type, where as they both have different physical equipment. For PSTN, there's a telephone, PBX, switches with frame relay and ATM backbone, while for VoIP a company gets the same voice with the addition of video and data with modem, ISDN, T1/E1 or other broadband services, Gateway, switches, routers, bridges, and backbone. These things show how the two differ in three of the main categories.

VoIP Technology and Its Acceptance:

Let's begin with the initial view of Voice over IP. Voice over IP was introduced in the early 1990s, but it was not initially accepted by most. On the frontier of this denial of acceptance would be the quality of the services. For instance, in the early 1990s not everyone had the access to broadband unlike today. Therefore, the dial-up modem connections were too weak for the quality of the sound or video to attract the attention of the big industries. However, by the late 1990s the potential of cost reduction simulated the acceptance of VoIP. In a review by Tim Hindle the author sites an example of CISCO systems, which "reckons it saved itself 250,000 telephone calls and 17% of its operating costs by setting up a website to provide its customers with technical backup (p. 1). Also, the acceptance came about because of many of the benefits of VoIP, which will be more thoroughly covered later on. However, an important aspect to the acceptance of VoIP most definitely is the elimination of many of the expenses of the company's infrastructure because it integrated the voice and data into one convergent network. According to Becca Madder, "About 4% of SBC's midzie to large companies are switching to VoIP every year (p.1).

As you clearly now know what VoIP has to offer, it is quite important to understand the technological aspects of VoIP as well as how it came to be accepted by the many industries. There are many different types of technologies involved in the voice over IP telephony system. Analyzing VoIP through how the whole procedure of sending voice over IP works is very important. In VoIP, the voice or video of a subject is transmitted through IP packets. These take place in real time just like any circuit switch phones. There is a big process of creating IP packets. According to Amit Dhir packets are sent through Internet where routers and switches examine the destination address. Then it routes and delivers the packet appropriately to the destination. He goes on to show how when the "destination receives the packet, the packet goes through the reverse process for playback" (p. 2).

Another technology aspect of voice over IP is an IP phone. IP phones vary from the more tradition phones because unlike these where they go into a phone jack, an IP phone connects to a local area network. Below is an illustration of the IP Phone that represents how the IP Phone is connected to the different terminals and Gateways. They all work through the IP network to provide the same functionality of a traditional phone.

Let's take a look at the following figure of IP phones and how they work.:

IP Phones

In spite of the high level of integration that is provided in the IP phone chipsets from ASSP manufacturers, there are numerous opportunities for value added differentiation using Spartan-II devices. This is because these chipsets represent a lowest common denominator solution, with few interfaces. Examples of enhanced features include:

* PDA interfaces: While both chipsets provide RS-232 serial ports for PDA interconnect

only the Lucent offering provides a USB interface, and neither provides USB 2.0 support.

* Non-Ethernet LAN interfaces: While Fast Ethernet is the natural choice in a corporate

environment, the use of IP phones in a small or home office environment will require

support for one or more of the new home networking or wireless LAN standards such as

HomePNA,