VoIP - IP Telephony White Papers

Voice Rules: The Practical Challenges of Voice on the LAN

• Tags:
• voip - ip telephony,
• traffic,
• telephone,
• carrier

Overview During the past year, virtually all of the network and telecommunications trade publications have run feature stories about the trend of convergence –voice, video, and data communications all being transmitted across a common infrastructure, typically based on IP (the Internet Protocol). This includes Internet telephony as a way to bypass long-distance toll charges, and various techniques such as voice-over-ATM or voice-over-frame relay for carrying voice traffic over the pre-existing enterprise data networks. Convergence of voice and data traffic in the wide area network, is becoming more common due to the immediate cost savings that can often be realized. Convergence is also being driven by the ubiquity and characteristics of IP networking. IP networks are based on a totally distributed architecture where no single entity has to be in control; instead these networks are able to grow in a “bottom-up” fashion as individual organizations add their own subnets to the global Internet. IP networks are ideal for voice/data convergence because users can add intelligence at the network edge; unlike traditional carrier networks, users don’t have to wait for the carrier to add desired features. But attention is now moving to the “last mile” of convergence – voice on the enterprise LAN. This implies not just the transmission of voice and data traffic over a common local transport network, but a radical shift in the way that organizations deploy, operate, and maintain their telephone systems. While there are many variations (described below) of voice over the LAN, one of the most-discussed alternatives is to use a combination of Ethernet phones with LAN-based call servers, as an alternative to the traditional PBX with its directly wired telephone sets. These solutions are typically referred to as LAN PBXs or IP-PBXs.

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