Application

The next stage of convergence

Although VoIP hasn’t set the Indian market on fire due to legal hurdles, the enterprise segment seems to be geared up to embrace the latest in VoIP technology, finds Megha Banduni.

Even as India is far from having achieved complete saturation in basic telephone connectivity, the market is preparing itself for next-generation IP-based technology. Most of the players in the market prefer bundled offerings such as IP phones, VoIP, IP PBX and IP Centrix. Companies are waking up to the fact that IP-based technology can enable substantial telecom cost savings, and telcos are realising that they can offer various converged services using voice and data network services over IP.

After the adoption of voice and data, integrating video is the next big thing along with session initiation protocol (SIP) and push to talk (PTT) technologies. For now, the area of strategic focus for the future is the triple play—the convergence of voice, data and video. The only hindrance comes from regulatory hurdles and the need for better connectivity.

Convergence is in

According to research by Gartner, convergence in the enterprise is happening rapidly on both the wired and wireless LAN, reducing network and device costs and driving new capabilities for voice and data access across wired and wireless networks. More than 50 percent of employees conduct business away from the office, and voice is a primary business application for these mobile workers.

Today, a mobile strategy for the organisation does not merely mean issuing cellular phones to employees; mobility goes far beyond this. Organisations need to have enterprise-class mobility that will give consistent communications empowerment and control to all of their workers, whether they are at their desk or at their home-office, moving around the enterprise campus or out on the road.

As customers deploy various applications like IP telephony and unified messaging, they are demanding intelligent communication which will seamlessly integrate communication capabilities and business processes. This warrants the need for an extensible platform which will deliver the triple play. Customers today are investing in best-of-breed solutions which are based on open standards and are inter-operable with other vendors.

With businesses becoming complex and virtualised, organisations are demanding collaborative solutions such as meet-me conferencing and audio-video conferencing that will help them take decisions in real-time. With affordable bandwidth and falling infrastructure costs, the enterprise segment is looking for players who can provide such services. This shows a growing need for a shift to IP. Customers who currently are on traditional systems are talking of migrating to IP telephony and want to avail the obvious advantages which IP telephony brings.

The IP telephony market for CY2004 was around $60 million and is expected to grow at a CAGR of 35 percent in the next couple of years. (Source: Frost & Sullivan). As per F&S projections, the number of IP ports shipped will exceed that of TDM by 2007. However, this is not to say that the traditional telephony market will just disappear. The lower end of the market that is highly price-sensitive will continue to prefer traditional telephony.

Harish M, General Manager, Business Development and Media Relations for Texas Instruments, India, believes that VoIP can be used extensively for voice-based communication, two-way video-conferencing or multi-party video-conferencing (apart from the basic data communication) as it is all packaged. This is a global trend. The future will include traditional PBAX/PBX to be replaced completely by VoIP in offices. VoIP will be available on the wireless LAN that will allow wireless phones within offices. VoIP is also used in cellular systems, for example, the PTT. It can be used as radio trunking networks within closed user groups.

“The main concern for us as a service provider comes in the form of obsolescence of existing technology and the cost of rolling out new technology. The main issue at that level is investments. Typically, enterprises combat this concern with a thorough cost-benefit analysis. Considering this, in the long run, deploying VoIP is an advantage,” adds Harish.

Take a SIP of VoIP

Looking forward in VoIP technology, the trend is to use SIP, a proposed Internet standard, for setting up, controlling and tearing down sessions in the Internet. Sessions include, but are not limited to, Internet telephone calls and multimedia conferences. SIP is also used for instant messaging (IM) and presence.

Over the last few years, many organisations have been merging their segregated voice, data, wired and wireless networks, thereby creating a converged network based on IP technology. The reasons for SIP’s growing popularity within the communication industry as a telephony protocol is on account of its ability to run across a converged IP network. It has been specifically designed to be used on any IP-capable device, be it a mobile phone, e-mail, IM, IP phone or set-top box.

SIP has another important feature called Presence. “A SIP device or program will register itself on the network, allowing your presence or availability to be published to other users on the network. This presence information allows the user to control how they want to be communicated with—via voice, e-mail or IM. In addition, by controlling who can see your presence information, one can control his accessibility,” explains Dinesh Sehgal, National Marketing Manager for Convergence Solutions at Avaya.

In the next five years, the world is going to change in terms of technology, and VoIP will be in demand Phil Edholm CTO & VP Network Architecture Nortel Enterprise Networks	A SIP device will register itself on the network, allowing your presence to be published to other users on the network Dinesh Sehgal National Marketing Manager Convergence Solutions Avaya	The primary concern for us as a service provider is the obsolescence of existing technology Harish M General Manager Business Dev. & Media Relations Texas Instruments India

Changing world

Phil Edholm, Chief Technology Officer and Vice-president of Network Architecture for Nortel Enterprise Networks, sees an opportunity for IP- based technology in India, especially in the segments of BPO, traditional enterprise and government. Nortel earns half its revenue from the BPO segment. Says Edholm, “In the nineties, data over IP exploded, and slowly voice over IP did too. This transition was not due to IP technology alone…it was due to a change in the need and modes of communication. VoIP is in demand due to the way we are changing our ways of communication. In the next five years, the world is going to change in terms of technology, and VoIP will be in demand.”

The growth of VoIP-based technology will increase in the years to come simply because people will use it due to its flexibility, cost-effectiveness and features that are not available in a traditional phone. If you have a broadband Internet connection, you need not maintain and pay the additional cost for a line just to make telephone calls.

The big advantage of IP telephony over traditional phones is that the former allows virtualisation. In traditional telephony, all the components such as switches, routers and telephones have to be kept together, whereas in IP telephony the control remains in one place while the components can be deployed anywhere.

But the problem is…

Though everyone is talking about it, and want to adopt and reap the benefits of VoIP, the biggest hindrance seems to be government regulations.

Elaborates Sehgal, “We are looking at three major challenges. The first is the inter-connectivity of the PSTN-private network, which will facilitate optimum utilisation of resources and derive the maximum from what the technology can deliver. The second challenge is the reliability of last-mile connectivity, which will ensure higher uptime of systems and lower loss of revenue. The third is the inter-operability issue, which will give greater choice to customers so that they do not get stuck with a particular vendor.”

According to a study by market research firm iLocus, the Indian VoIP market is set to account for around 61 percent of the world-wide international long distance traffic by 2007. In addition, with the growing number of BPO and MNC offshore centres in India, IP-based technology adoption will increase. It will thus be one of the dominant technologies in future.

Subhashini Prabhakar, CTM, Dax Networks, believes that the telecom sector will benefit the most from this technology. “The technology is much standardised world-wide, but in India it is still at the approval stage. Convergence is on the move in telecom. After legalisation of VoIP, there will be a revolution in this sector.”

megha@expresscomputeronline.com