Electro/Telecom Industry Trends
June 2004
VoIP on the Comeback Trail
 |
| Issue Table of Contents |
|
|
At one time, Voice over IP (VoIP) was the next big thing. It was thought that VoIP would force telecommunications providers to change how they operate, effectively reshaping an industry nearly 130 years in the making, and would provide end users with a new and affordable way to meet their telecommunications needs. It was going to change the world.
Of course, that was the late 1990s. There were a lot of technologies — both realistic and half-baked — that were trumpeted as killer applications. Unfortunately, most sunk into near oblivion with the crash of the dot-com bubble. For a while, VoIP looked like it was destined to do the same.
But several years later, VoIP is making a slow, yet successful, comeback. VoIP service providers are pushing forward with new marketing efforts. Traditional telecommunications providers are taking a second look at the technology. And now the government is getting in on the act.
“There’s a lot going on right now concerning whether or not VoIP should be subject to regulation,” says Steve Whitesell, chair of TR-41, the Telecommunications Industry Association’s (TIA) User Premises Telecommunications Requirements committee. While the result of the debate about whether individual states or the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) should be in charge of regulating VoIP is still forthcoming, one thing is clear — this increasing level of interest in VoIP is a sure indicator of its resurgence. “There certainly seems to be a lot more interest in this whole regulatory issue in the last six months to a year then there was prior to that time. People were sort of asking questions, but nobody seemed hot on it. Now we have the FBI petitioning the FCC about subjecting VoIP to CALEA-like wiretapping rules, and we have the FCC issuing a notice of proposed rulemaking talking about VoIP and so on…. It seems to indicate that there is growing interest in this area.”
Why are people so interested in VoIP and not content to leaving it behind as a relic of the dot-com era? One reason may have to do with the relatively low barrier of entry the technology provides to aspiring telecommunications providers. “With VoIP, you’re just another packet on the Internet, so it’s low cost. There’s an infrastructure in place that service providers who are entrants into VoIP can take advantage of,” explains Cheryl Blum, chair of TIA’s TR-45 Mobile & Personal Communications Systems Standards committee.
Of course, this infrastructure is also one of the limiting factors VoIP is currently facing. VoIP translates voice signals into packets, which, just like data packets used to transfer emails, travel across the Internet to the receiver. The packets are then reassembled and converted back into voice. “If you’re trying to carry on a conversation, there may be large delays because of time spent processing and packetizing,” says Steve. This latency can lead to a poor level of quality perceived by people who are used to the instant responsiveness of traditional phone services. For many, a delay of more than 150 milliseconds will be noticeable enough to make a difference. That’s why standards organizations are now discussing whether or not to recommend that there should be no more than a 30-millisecond delay allowed for the transmission of a packet after it is created, which itself can take 50 milliseconds. “That’s pretty ambitious, but that’s the sort of thing you need for a conversation to be totally transparent to the fact that the packetizing is going on,” says Steve.
Another issue being addressed has to do with standards. Originally, when VoIP was first introduced, there was little agreement on what transmission protocols should be used for converting voice signals into packets and back into voice. Like the Beta versus VHS wars of a previous decade, this resulted in a proliferation of hardware that was often incompatible. “If you made a VoIP telephone the way you thought it should be done, somebody on the other end would have to have a VoIP phone that was made by you as well in order for the two to communicate,” Steve explains.
In 2000, TIA began to address this issue with IS-811, Telecommunications - Telephone Terminal Equipment - Performance and Interoperability Requirements for Voice-over-IP (VoIP) Feature Telephones (2000). The interim standard set out to define what features — including transmission protocols — VoIP phones should support. This type of work, along with the gradual maturation of the technology, has led more and more people in the industry to find agreement on the various protocols. And as these options have coalesced, VoIP phones are more likely to be interoperable, giving the technology a greater opportunity to reach more people.