VoIP Telecommunications – Transitioning From Landlines to Internet Telephony
Since the inception of the telegraph in the 19th century, the telecommunications industry has endured many upheavals. In its most recent history, the breakup of AT&T in 1984, the Internet boom throughout the nineties and the subsequent laying of a fiber optic infrastructure worldwide, the advent of the cable television industry and cellular phone networks, have all contributed to changing the face of telecommunications as we know it.
Today, as it was with the advent of the cellular industry, we are in the middle of another telecommunications upheaval. A transition, if you will, from the very way the human voice travels the world. Voice over Internet Protocol, aka VoIP, allows the analog voice to be converted into digital packets that are sent on their way over the Internet to destinations far and wide. The copper lines laid by the legacy telco’s throughout the 20th century have become costly, cumbersome, and expensive to maintain. VoIP, on the other hand, is cheap and fast!
Internet Telephony in the Home
As the World Wide Web infrastructure grows, more and more households are turning to high speed broadband connections for their Internet service. Cable TV, the legacy telephone companies, cellular networks, and wireless metropolitan WANs, all offer high speed internet access via DSL, Cable Modem or wireless frequencies.
While all these industries are jockeying for position in the lucrative residential VoIP market, pure play VoIP providers like Sun Rocket, Packet8, and industry leader Vonage, are already offering packages anywhere from $8 to $25 a month, undercutting telephone rates and saving consumers up to 60% on their phone bills. Long distance charges within the same regions are non existent, and international rates for placing calls over the Internet are laughably low, to many countries as low as 2 cents a minute. For the residential consumer with broadband access, VoIP is already a viable alternative to the legacy landline telephone companies.
The trend in the cell phone industry, while not yet widespread, is Fixed Mobile Convergence (FMC). Cell phones that cover multiple frequencies, including the lower, non regulated WiFi frequency (802.11), allow users to place calls over the much cheaper Internet via a wireless network. For cell phones, this results in expanded coverage as well, as calls can be made indoors and out.
Just as business in the 1980’s and 90’s spent billions building out their Local Area Networks (LAN), the technology of VoIP, together with the more than adequate bandwidth offered by today’s LANs, is spurring the evolution of the “Converged Network“. Businesses are finding that the technology to merge data and voice into one network exists, and by implementing that technology, they can cut their telecommunications costs considerably.
Legacy PBX systems are falling to the wayside in favor of the IP PBX, a software application that resides on a server within the LAN, or simply within the very “smart” Internet phones themselves.
The open source PBX software application Asterix can be downloaded for free over the Internet, and the installation consist of burning a bootable CD which puts the application and the Linux operating system on a hard drive in its own computer. With the new release of AsterixNow, configuration of the PBX network is intuitive and user friendly.
Peer to Peer VoIP networks make particular sense for businesses with branch offices spread over large geographic areas, or even internationally. Calls made within the network are always free no matter where they are going.
The Peer to Peer VoIP provider Skype offers voice, video conferencing, file sharing and more, opening up new possibilities for businesses and consumers, virtually turning a computer into a sophisticated telecommunications terminal. Downloading the software is free, and calls off the network are charged at a very low VoIP monthly rate.
While the technology of voice over IP has not been without its obstacles, most of the functional issues have been resolved. Security issues that are unique to VoIP have been recognized, and like any IP network, must be dealt with and kept up to date. Call quality has vastly improved andQuality of Service techniques have been implemented to give the digital voice packets the priority they need.
To say that the legacy phone companies and the landlines they run on are obsolete would be an overstatement. There will always be locations where a landline is the only connection to the outside world. But for those who have access to broadband, VoIP is the trend of the future – and the future is now!
2/20/07
