VoIP, WiFi and the Future of Traditional Telecom

PetiePooo writes "Those of us in the telecom industry have been watching it wither and die in the past few years. Here's why. The Register has an article about the future of mobile communications using VoIP on WiFi. From the article: "... voice over IP would gradually come to be a prime driver of mobile Internet." VoIP has been considered by many for a while now to be the future of traditional telephony. Combining VoIP and WiFi makes a compelling argument for the convergence of voice and data services over a single platform. Here's a previous slashdot discussion on industry's efforts to make this happen."

Comments

Huh?

[Doom Ihl' Varia]

"Here's why"

How could some barely deployed technology before responsible for the destruction of an industry? What, did Verizon, Sprint, AT&T, etc al just decide to make poor business choices out of fear? I'm really at a loss on this one.

VoIP rocks!

[afidel]

Having the same number follow you from your desk, to anywhere in the campus, to anywhere you can get a VPN connection (WiFi or otherwise), to home (over VPN) is just too cool and too usefull if you want to telecomute part time. Some of the marketing folks were simply blown away when I showed em that they could get calls at the airport, at the coffee shop, at home, and anywhere on the corporate campus all from the same number that they used at the desk. They had call forwarding to anyone in the VoIP system whether they were in their home office or halfway around the world, could do multiline confrencing using the power of the PBX and only need the single connection in their home office. Basically VoIP, especially with ubiquitous wireless access would change communications as much as the cellphone did. And to make corporations happy it greatly reduces the costs. If all of you branch offices already have decent internet connections then adding them into the corporate VoIP cloud just makes sense, all of those calls are already paid for in the line charges. With the cost of bandwidth on an unending downward spiral the cost of calls will basically drop to zero, it really won't make sense to meter them because the metering will cost more than the connection.

Re:VoIP rocks!

[Cyberdyne]

With the cost of bandwidth on an unending downward spiral the cost of calls will basically drop to zero, it really won't make sense to meter them because the metering will cost more than the connection.

According to AT&T, that happened more than 20 years ago: even before the 1984 breakup into Baby Bells, they were saying the most expensive element of a long distance call was timing and billing it. They may have been exaggerating, but once you factor in the need to audit and log everything, keeping clocks synchronized, all the extra CPU load on the exchanges, and most significantly the extra software requirements (instead of "patch line X to line Y", it becomes "log start time, patch line X to line Y, keep track of time until the line is dropped again") and customer support (people querying charges - "I didn't call Wisconsin that day, I was in hospital!", "But 281-555-1234 should be a local call from here"...) - just charge $x per month and make sure the calls get through. Much simpler, hence cheaper. (Just compare a telco's billing department to an ISP's...)

A few years ago, a FAQ for ISPs was "why don't you offer a pay-per-minute option, as an alternative to flat-rate subscriptions?" - the answer was that all the extra overhead would make the per-minute billing more expensive than flat-rate.

For that matter, MCI now offer flat-rate calls through the US (and Canada, for an extra $4/month) on landlines.

Internet QOS

[bizitch]

My experiences has been poor when routing VOIP across Internet links.

The problem isn't bandwidth/speed at either end - but throttling at the internap points between backbone providers (XO Communications is particularly notorious when it comes to this issue)

When it comes to VOIP packets, there needs to be decent QOS/Priority Queuing from end to end to make it viable - and right now the tier one providers aren't exactly playing nicely together in the sandbox.

Will 911 keep up though ?

[Audrey23]

I am a maintenance tech for a local 911 call center and so far we have not had to deal with the voip mystery of where the caller really is, so I wonder if there are any others like me that have had to deal with location information issues and if you had any real troubles with programming of the voip to pstn translation so as to really find where that guy is who is choking on his latte' and needs a paramedic right now, but we can't find him cuz the ALI/MSAG database says he is in a building at X/Y location where the switch is but no closer for us to tell...

We have this issue with cellphones now, I can only imagine when wireless voip becomes common that it will take quite a while (read years) for it to come up to speed for providing location information to our call centers.

And our local city has decided to convert all their phone switch/system to voip over copper (cisco I believe) and we already have had issues with location information not being correct or dynamics (phone user takes his phone to a different building but database says he is still where he was) not staying accurate.

Wonder how others are coping?

Now with that said I hope that wireless voip happens, cuz I think the idea rocks too, its just that 911/PSTN services are still in the dark ages when it comes to technology (publicly funded, means slow to change)...

Been a lurker for years now, and finally get to post on something relevant to my trade :)

Just expanding pipes != works well and cheap

[Bookwyrm]

Just expanding the pipes is exactly as you said a simple and stupid solution. It works just fine on simple and stupid networks. It becomes much less of a solution on large and complex networks.

If you have only a mesh of six or two T1s, then sure, maybe replacing all those T1s with pairs of T1s or fractional T3s and replacing all the routers with new ones to handle the new bandwidth might be cheaper than playing around with complex protocol design.

But if you have a nation wide network with literally hundreds of network links and hundreds of routers, just 'expanding the pipes' becomes a nightmare operations issue.

• You run into the nasty problem of "Well, we need a bigger router to handle the expanded bandwidth, but the colocate we are in has no more rackspace at the moment. The nearest other facility is ten miles down the road, and we would have to see if we could get all the customer and other data lines re-routed and migrated within the same maintenance window."
• You have the same problem with physical bandwidth. If you have a link that's running over a physical T1, and you need more bandwidth, do you get another T1 laid, switch to a fractional T3? If you are using a T3 and need more, do you go to OC3? Sonet? Of course, that might require a bigger router...
• We'll just throw a bigger router at it! Yeah, right. Who wants to throw the latest greatest model router in without any testing? Of course, those new interface cards for the new expanded bandwidth connections might require a different router software load than what you're running on the other routers... you are paying/spending money on a real test lab, aren't you, before committing your entire network to this? Of course, that's assuming you are staying within one vendor family... we'll skip the issues of CSU/DSUs, and such for now. Oh, yes -- don't forget a larger router means a bigger colocate cost and/or bigger power costs and/or bigger cooling issues (doubling the power supply or AC to a facility is not cheap. Those brand new expanded routers have to live somewhere!)
• One hopes the old equipment you are replacing with the new, expanded equipment is paid off, of course. Otherwise you are expanding your debt along with your network... not the way to stay in business/make money. Don't forget the operational cost growth, either! Might have to stock new spares for the new routers, train the techs on the new routers... hope you didn't need a new network monitoring system to handle the new, expanded network. If the expanded network required expansion via new data links through new carriers, better make sure the NOC knows who to call when things go wrong with what lines...
• There are other costs, of course. To quote my favorite professor: "Like my old army leutinent used to say, 'Ain't nothin' simple when you're doin' it for real.'"

Consider the phrase "compound interest". With a small amount, in the short term, it's not that impressive. With a large amount, in the long term, it can yield some pretty impressive returns. Just "expanding the pipe" is the same thing -- works fine in the short term, on small networks. Over the long term, it gets exponentially more cost-complex.

(It should be noted that the human race is running around building such things as the Internet precisely because it didn't "add more muscle" or "add more speed" or "add more armor", but because it figured out how to use what it had more intelligently than its competitors. At some point you have to start using your brain.)