voip...u already use it... U just didn't know it???Developing a...

voip...u already use it... U just didn't know it???

Developing a Stealth Strategy for VoIP Rollout

Written by Robert Poe
Thursday, 27 October 2005

At the Telecom 05 conference in Las Vegas, CTOs of major carriers hinted at what could develop into an intriguing strategy for rolling out IP telephony on a broad scale to residential markets: keeping it quiet. That would allow both service providers and their customers to obtain the benefits of voice over IP, while freeing customers of the need to worry about the well-publicized concerns that surround the technology today.

In fact, VoIP is already taking over carriers' core networks in just such a way. Balan Nair, CTO at Qwest, described a situation in which engineers had come up with a way to offer a particular nationwide business service that was based on VoIP technology. "The sales department said customers don't like voice over IP, it's not stable, it's too cutting edge, so I said don't tell them that, it's just voice," Nair said.


Qwest already practices what Nair preaches. He noted, for example, that his company currently carries 2.6 billion minutes a month of long-distance traffic that it converts from TDM and carries over its IP backbone. "Nobody knows it, it's completely transparent to our customers," he said. "As long as you've got voice, who cares if it's TDM, digital, analog, voice over IP?" The benefits of the approach are considerable, according to Nair. "The total cost to deploy this is just two feature servers, one in Chicago and one in Houston, instead of Class 5 switches all over the map," he said.

Taking VoIP all the way to the residence is a bit trickier. "For a consumer offering, using bring-your-own broadband, there are implications," said Nair. "It rides on DSL or cable modem service, and last time we all checked, those are best-effort services." Verizon CTO Mark Wegleitner agreed: "Voice over the Internet in the long run is probably not going to provide the five-nines or high-quality voice that consumers are going to require."

Bill Smith, BellSouth's CTO, described a solution that combines the cost savings of VoIP with the last-mile reliability of traditional telephony. "What we've talked about is why can't we go out to the DSLAM, in the case of a fiber-to-the-node customer, and basically terminate that analog POTS signal at the DSLAM, and then handle everything from a voice over IP perspective in the network," he said. "You still get all the cost advantages of a voice over IP network, and yet that customer's interface doesn't change, and if you're line powering it you've still got the lifeline kind of capabilities."

Still, to bring residential customers all the benefits of IP telephony, it'll be necessary to bring the IP part all the way to those residences. That will require making it as reliable as traditional phone service. Once that happens, there'll be no need to keep it secret — nor to make a big deal out of it. Because in the end, the VoIP industry will know it has succeeded when no one considers it an industry at all, and it has simply become part of the communications industry.