Carriers are key to VoIP prominence

NETWORK WORLD NEWSLETTER: OPTICAL NETWORKING
09/28/05

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* Report from Fall VON 2005 Conference & Expo
* Links related to Optical Networking
* Featured reader resource
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Today's focus: Carriers are key to VoIP prominence

By Phil Hochmuth

The true value of convergence won't be realized until
self-contained corporate VoIP networks are linked in to the
larger IP world through carriers, network professionals said at
last week's Fall VON 2005 Conference & Expo.

Some of these professionals say they are interested in tying
their converged networks directly in to carrier facilities
through IP trunks that use Session Initiation Protocol for
transport. That would give businesses more flexibility in
provisioning voice/data lines to facilities, while opening the
possibilities of more-advanced applications, said those at the
show, which attracted more than 300 exhibitors, 7,600 attendees
and keynote speakers from companies such as BellSouth, Skype and
Vonage.

But such deployments are in their infancy, as large IP trunks in
carrier networks are hard to find.

"SIP trunking holds a tremendous value for tying a bunch of
small sites together transparently," says Arnold Solomon, IT
architect for the Southern Company, which operates utilities
Mississippi Power, Gulf Power and Georgia Power, and provides
wireless network services in the Southeast.

Most companies, whether they run traditional or IP PBXs, must
plug these boxes in to digital public switched telephone network
(PSTN) circuits from phone companies to make calls to the
outside world. Companies might be able to connect branch offices
and even home workers in to a unified VoIP network, but the VoIP
stops at the voice carrier, in most cases, as it's converted to
digital TDM voice.

The alternative is plugging in to an IP voice circuit instead of
a less-flexible digital voice trunk. Solomon says if IP-based
trunks connected the Southern Company's hundreds of offices and
facilities, the firm could more efficiently manage how it buys
and uses voice services, rather than having to purchase a local
T-1 digital PSTN trunk to each site.

But Solomon adds that his own company still has far to go in
terms of converging its internal networks before linking to a
carrier via IP. With a mostly TDM-based infrastructure of
Siemens PBXs, Solomon says the Southern Company is just starting
to move toward IP handsets and PBXs.

Another user further along in its convergence push also seeks to
take the next step with IP trunking.

"Local trunks are something that we really want to get away
from," says Todd Goodyear, vice president and manager of voice
product development at Merrill Lynch in New York. "Having
[voice] T-1s locally at every branch [is inefficient]. We want
to move from those to IP trunks."

Merrill Lynch is deploying IP phones to more than 600 branch
offices this year, tying the sites back to centralized Cisco IP
PBX clusters at distributed data centers. But remote sites will
still require local trunks to make outside calls in some cases.
Goodyear says IP trunking would let Merrill Lynch allocate PSTN
phone trunks virtually through the company's centralized data
centers. This would make management and provisioning easier,
because data and on-net calls are already managed centrally.

"This is something we expected to start to have legs last year,
but we don't see it taking off, whether it's issues around
regulation or just demand in the marketplace," he says.

One expert says while carriers might be dragging their heels
about offering IP voice trunks in their networks, such a move
will ultimately benefit both customers and service providers.

"In the core of their voice networks, carriers are pretty much
IP," says Annabel Dodd, an independent network consultant and
author of the forthcoming The Essential Guide to
Telecommunications, Fourth Edition. "Carriers are starting to
move IP to the edge. It's just a matter of time before they do
offer that on a large scale, because they don't want to continue
to support two or three different types of networks."

For their part, vendors announced services last week at VON that
might begin to address some of the needs for large-scale IP
trunking and VoIP services. MCI and Sprint, for example, both
announced services designed to tie together IP services and IP
PBX gear.

Qwest and Microsoft also could help make converged applications
more easily deployable. Through a new partnership, Microsoft
said last week it is contributing its Solution for Enhanced VoIP
services to a suite comprising hosted versions of Microsoft
server products, including Exchange Server 2003, Office Live
Communications Server 2005 and Windows SharePoint Services, with
Sylantro Systems' Application Feature Server. Microsoft and
Qwest are working to deploy this suite with Qwest's OneFlex VoIP
network services.

Senior Editor Tim Greene and the IDG News Service contributed to
this story.

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_______________________________________________________________
To contact: Phil Hochmuth

Phil Hochmuth is a Network World Senior Editor and a former
systems integrator. You can reach him at
mailto:phochmut@nww.com.
_______________________________________________________________
This newsletter is sponsored by Nokia
Empower Your Mobile Enterprise

Nokia believes that business mobility will fundamentally change
the way work gets done-and for the better. To allow the entire
organization to get the most from this paradigm shift in
productivity, Nokia Enterprise Solutions focuses on delivering
increased efficiency through enhanced mobility. Learn more by
downloading this white paper today!
http://www.fattail.com/redir/redirect.asp?CID=115995
_______________________________________________________________
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