OPINION: There's a great deal of activity in IP telephony--where does your company fit on the technology timeline?

It feels like the "Year of IP Telephony". If you haven't received at least three invitations to product launches, seminars, and roadshows over the past few weeks, you need to circulate your e-mail address more.

I wrote in the last column that the convergence of voice and data would be one of the significant trends over the next three to five years. Judging from the level of vendor activity, it looks like it might happen even more quickly.

We've certainly seen a great deal of activity in this area--and it's following the usual new technology progression. First there were the early adopters (like us) who generally can't resist bleeding-edge technology.

This is the painful stage (there is a reason for the term "bleeding-edge"), where vendor claims are stretched to the limit. Configurations and designs that look great on paper translate to implementations that seriously test a field engineer's sanity.

Technology that is taken for granted becomes a "future release feature". The odd dropped packet and not-quite-configured-right router plays havoc with the quality of service across the network.

Everything finally works, the issues and problems are forgotten, and the experience helps pave the way for the next round of customers.

Some of the difficulty with the initial installations of IP telephony has been working with the various carriers in Australia to develop appropriate quality of service (QoS) policies.

With QoS suddenly critical, policies need to be applied to routers that will ensure that the voice traffic and telephony signalling is given the correct treatment within the network.

This ensures the smooth operation of the phone network, and is applied for both IP handsets and routers that are being interfaced to PABXs or key systems to provide toll bypass trunks.

Early installations where customers are using carrier VPNs were also problem prone. In most cases the issues have been resolved, and many of the implementation rules for QoS have been adapted for local conditions and telcos (many international "standards" being unsuitable in Australia due to the cost of WAN bandwidth limiting the size of links that can be economically provisioned).

Next are the early adopters with business focus-the ones who can see where the new technology is heading and find opportunities to turn this lead into a competitive advantage.

One converged site in Australia, Swinburne University (in Melbourne), only has a handful of IP handsets, but with over 11,000 voice-ready IP points it will be one of the largest end-to-end Internet Protocol (IP) telephony networks in the world (outside Cisco's own headquarters campus in the US, of course!).

The University's Director of IT Services, Richard Constantine, commented "We want to make sure that Swinburne's technology infrastructure keeps us at the forefront of technological universities in the Asia Pacific region". Which sums up why some organisations are quick to move into new areas and embrace new technologies.

Then comes the majority of companies. Which is about where we are now. They have a PABX (and it works perfectly fine), and they see the benefits of a new technology, like voice over IP, but it would help to have a solid business case.

Fortunately, by now the technology is mature, with many reference sites adding credibility to the promised business benefits. The emphasis has shifted to applications and demonstrated business value.

Brisbane Ports Corporation is in the process of implementing an IP Telephony network, which enables it to offer data and voice networking services to its tenants over the same network.

Plus, a customised application has been developed that displays all daily ship movements on their phone handset, something which is not possible on a traditional PABX.

Having a background in traditional TDM (as in PABXs) as well as data networking has enabled us to work with customers that are content with their existing "old world" telephony systems, as well as those migrating to the new world of converged telephony.

Only time will tell whether the pendulum will swing back the other way, as it often does with IT, when my inbox is filled by invites to seminars on the benefits of a "separate phone system with dedicated lines and a proprietary call management server" that isn't reliant on an IP network.

Oliver Descoeudres is marketing manager at network IP/Internet network infrastructure builder and solutions provider NetStar Australia. He can be contacted at marketing@netstarnetworks.com or on 02 9805 9759.

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