Intel: VoIP is Beachhead to More Collaboration

Rob writes "VoIP is old news. Long live SoIP. That was the message from Intel Corp's director of VoIP strategy in its digital enterprise group Michael Stanford at a recent industry conference in San Francisco, California. Stanford, who works with business managers and engineers in and outside Intel, said that, while 2005 has been a good year for VoIP, the technology is the "first drop in the deluge" of IP network applications. "VoIP is a beachhead, so to speak, of services over IP. I can't emphasize that enough," Stanford said, referring to collaboration services that could benefit from running on infrastructures optimized for VoIP."

Comments

"IP technology"

[bigmouth_strikes]

"the technology is the 'first drop in the deluge' of IP network applications."

Yeah, I wonder what comes next over IP... email, downloading media and maybe even chat!!!

Everything will eventually be over the internet

[hellfire]

This is probably old news to most /.ers, but to those who just joined up yesterday, everything is going to be over the internet soon. Phone and Music was first to be made popular. Soon Videos will be mass marketed, and then TV and Movies. You can get them already, but I'm talking an iTunes type store for content, not P2P.

This is all due to Network Layer Abstraction. The internet is based on the idea that networks have different layers. The physical cable is one layer, while the protocol, TCP/IP is another. The data itself is yet another. The is a bit simplified, but idea is that if you change one layer, the other layers remain unchanged. I can use DSL or cable or dialup for internet data, but I can get music from iTunes no matter which service I chose. I could replace IP4 with IP6 and again still get that data. I could switch to Napster from iTunes and not affect my Internet service. I can switch from Vonage to Speakeasy or even to that godawfully expensive comcast phone service if I wanted (though it's more likely I'll switch from that TO vonage).

This is what truly opens us up to innovation and competition. The internet simply transfers data, but that data can literally be anything. Phone networks can only transfer voice information, and their transmission of data is limited. By separating out all these services, people can insert themselves anywhere in the network chain and make something new.

Bandwidth Gap

[NardofDoom]

Services over IP would be great. I'm looking forward to it. However, if everyone is VoIPing or teleconferencing or sharing the videos of their kids first steps, a couple things need to happen.

Sure 6Mbps downstream speed is great, unless you're trying to upload a video to a web host or worse, stream it from your machine. Upload speeds must be 50% of download speeds for this sort of future to happen. I'd love to have multiple VoIP phone lines once I have two or three teenage crotch goblins, but I can't do that if the upstream speed is only 768kbps (or whatever it is with Comcast).

Fix the upstream bandwidth gap, run some fiber to the home and then we'll talk about more services over IP.