Universally digital communication
By Leslie Faughnan
Once voice and video are completely digital, a universe of possibility opens up for all forms of communication, said Mike Conroy, head of the Cisco research and development centre in Galway.
“We are seeing a blurring of the lines between traditional wired telephony and the various forms of wireless and mobile communications,” he said. “Once you have ubiquitous IP, there are fewer and fewer technicalor conceptual limits to what can be done.”
With VoIP telephony, Conroy said, you have a wide range of choice in the end point. “It simply no longer matters whether you use a traditional desk handset, a cordless phone, a soft phone client on a PC or your choice of mobile device, especially increasingly smart phones like Blackberry or iPhone.”
Increasingly, the network does not matter either. “We can move seamlessly from Lan to Wan to wireless to GSM.”
The original drivers of VoIP were around toll bypass and overall cost reduction, Conroy said.
“These are still valid in the market, but maturing technology has brought us on to very fine grained flexibility in functions and in integration with the consumer and business applications people are using.
“Unified communications is today’s logical progression from our telephony routing heritage,’’ Conroy said. “But as all of our IP communications integrate, and many services will be hosted and even cloud-based, most such distinctions will be blurred.”
All of that is true also on the telco side, said Ronán McCarthy, managed services principal in Eircom. “For end users, telephony is still about always getting dial tone, with that famous 99.999 or ‘five nines’ reliability. Providing it using VoIP and being end-to-end digital is already here and providing that robust reliability over Lan or Wan is actually easy.”
Where the market was heading, McCarthy said, was towards various forms of managed and hosted communications services. “Telecommunications has always been a commodity service, so it is a logical progression to where we are today with a range from managed IP PBX on the customer’s server to a completely hosted and even cloud-based service. With really large volumes, that kind of virtual model may be the only practicable solution in the future.”
The possible restrictions are more to do with industry standards than with technical limits, McCarthy said. “That is why open-source software is becoming more significant in telecomms. The industry and its services are by definition universal, so we really do need one size to fit all. With SIP trunking and other new kinds of service, we carriers are still developing a coherent service model to give customers the range of SLAs they will require.”
Guy Johnston, managing director of European Telecommunications Management and a 20-year veteran consultant, took a pragmatic view. “It has to be remembered always that voice has to travel business class. Any acceptable telephony has to have good sound quality and absolute reliability before you add any smart digital features.
“That comes down to decent bandwidth and service quality control from handset to handset over whatever network. With VoIP and SIP and service providers who understand what is needed, we are getting there. On the other hand, despite the fairly obvious advantages to potential customers, it is noteworthy how few SIP trunk providers we have yet seen in the Irish market.”
