Voice services build out from network core

Voice services build out from network core
Most consumers do not reach for their computer mouse when they want to make a telephone call, and even if they do, the resulting conversation is often disturbed by peculiar speech delays. That may give the impression that voice-over-Internet Protocol (VoIP) technology still has far to go before it represents a challenge to the age-old telephone system. But the contributors to this week's In Focus section paint a very different picture of where Internet and local-network voice technologies are headed.

Indeed, many of us are already routinely making network-based calls, Debbie Greenstreet of Telogy Networks Inc., a division of Texas Instruments, points out in her exclusive online contribution (see www.eet.com/in_focus/). It's just that the technology transferring the conversation is buried in the network infrastucture. Greenstreet offers a revealing statistic: More than 15 million voice-over-IP ports are operating today, and that number is rapidly climbing.

The current scene represents a rapid turnaround in technology. The plain old telephone system was the avenue that opened up the Internet to the vast majority of today's users, and now network technology is attempting to incorporate the telephone as a network service. But analog-based switched telephone service has been a hard act to follow. The reason is the radically different nature of Internet traffic. Consisting of fragmented packets of digital data finding their way to a destination over multiple routes, the Internet poses the daunting engineering task of putting it all together so that the illusion of continuous speech is preserved.