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The emergence of the Internet is well measured by
comparing the proportion of data traffic to voice traffic on networks.
Internet traffic is doubling every four months, whereas voice traffic
grows by 6-9% annually. This makes a significant contribution to the
overall growth of data traffic which has already overtaken voice traffic.
It is expected that voice traffic will decline to less than 8% of
total network traffic by 2004 and based on current levels of growth,
the entire traffic on the public switched telephone network (PSTN)
may amount to less than one percent of the total before 2010. Therefore
voice communication (the basic business of traditional Telcos) is
no longer the driver for communications network design and it is timely
to consider the means whereby voice and data networks can converge.
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Internet telephony, also known as voice-over-IP
or IP telephony, is the real-time delivery of voice between two or
more parties, across networks using the Internet protocols, and the
exchange of information required to control this delivery.
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Most incumbent carriers have already begun to develop
data networks to augment their well-established voice infrastructures.
These incumbent service providers will link their new data networks
to the telephone system utilizing a new infrastructure.
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Internet carriers have already started to enter
the competition by proposing cheap long distance voice calls over
their data networks. Those focus exclusively on building data infrastructures
capable of carrying both voice and data traffic from the start.
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The short term effect of this process will be to
enable new voice servics to be introduced at competitive rates compared
to those of existing services. Ultimately however, wide deployment
of IP telephony will cause a wave of new applications and services
that will fundamentally change the way people use technology to communicate.
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As we move towards a new era in global telecommunications
(where voice and data solutions are provided across IP infrastructures),
standards continue to play a key role.
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IP Telephony is also known as Voice
over IP or Internet Telephony and it represents the technology which
uses IP-based data networks to transmit telephone calls. When the
idea of using the Internet to make telephone calls first became reality,
a handful of companies presented products that produced poor voice
quality and disorganized dialing directories for tracking the handful
of people who could receive calls. The challenge that IP telephony
faces is to deliver the voice, fax, or video packets in a dependable
flow to the user. It does this by taking the voice or data from the
source trunk where it is then digitized, compressed because of the
limited bandwidth of the Internet, and sent across the network where
the process is reversed. When that doesn't occur and the data packets
are lost or don't arrive in time to be decoded in the correct order
this causes the speech to break up or have a ripple or stutter effect,
similar to a poor cellular-phone connection.
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The technology of IP Telephony and the
market are changing fast. Standards are rapidly evolving and some
have yet to be widely implemented and tested in commercial products.
IP telephony is a major networking issue today and PC telephony players
are all trying to offer a different solution to beat their competitors.
It is an evolution that will widely affect corporate telecommunications
in the future.
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IP telephony enables companies to place
telephony calls over IP networks instead of public switched telephone
networks. Currently IP telephony offers cheaper call prices with less
quality of service than the standard public switched telephone network
otherwise known as PSTNs. As the quality improves many companies will
begin to replace their current PSTNs in order to save money and be
more cost effective. It is also important to note that currently IP
telephony services are relatively unregulated by government. In the
United States, the Federal Communications Commission says they do
not plan to regulate connections between a phone user and an IP telephony
service provider.
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