VoIP comes of age, offering a new lease of life for copper telephone networks
By Jean-Pierre Dumolard, Cirpack President

At the height of the dotcom bubble, some vendors were airing TV advertisements heralding a major revolution – very soon, everyone would be using the Internet for their telephone calls. This claim was predicated on a sound analytical basis, inasmuch as our telephone networks were deployed in the 1970s, and modern Internet and IT technologies now allow telephony services to be provided at lower cost. Furthermore, new services made possible by combining voice, data processing and video technologies have the potential to revolutionize consumers' telephone usage… and telecom operators' revenue streams.

This optimistic vision was soon confronted by the reality on the ground. Telephony over IP technologies were not yet mature, the hardware was too expensive and did not deliver the necessary performance, local loop bandwidth were insufficient, and most importantly, telecom operators were reluctant to suddenly rip up and replace the circuit-switched infrastructure that had taken so much time and effort to deploy.

VoIP reaches maturity

Nevertheless, a steadily increasing number of VoIP deployment and migration projects have been announced since the start of 2004. Protocols such as SIP and MGCP have reached maturity, allowing the use of VoIP on a very large scale, whereas their precursor, H.323, had quickly revealed its limitations. The advent of low-cost VoIP modems and telephones makes promoting VoIP to a mass market of residential and small business users a realistic proposition, and the intense competition surrounding the unbundling of the local loop has resulted in a plethora of broadband package offers, at least in some countries.

Today, an operator can deploy a very large number of VoIP lines and provide a service of equivalent quality to conventional telephony at a fraction of the cost. In Europe, France may well be the country where this revolution has gone furthest and fastest. All French ISPs and telecom operators now offer IP-based telephony services for business and/or home users.

Lessons learnt from early deployment projects

Cirpack's strong position in this market and the experience accumulated from numerous deployment projects have taught us that the value of a VoIP infrastructure is dependent on the switches and gateways that control it. The ease with which the operator can develop its network, offer more complex services and deal with regulatory requirements, for example, are all influenced by the quality of these devices.

An operator's infrastructure choices will determine whether or not it can participate in full unbundling, continue connecting new subscribers without generating disproportionate operating costs, optimize its interconnections with the PSTN, offer high value-added convergent services and generally, run a profitable business while remaining a credible player.

A new lease of life for land lines

The many recent deployments have shown that replacing circuit-switched telephony with IP-based systems is beneficial for both the consumer and the business market, thanks to the IP Centrex. The latest generation of switches not only provide comparable quality and reliability to conventional devices at only 10-20% of the cost, but are also the simplest solution to install and operate.

The incumbent operators have not been caught out. Although still very much the dominant players in their respective markets, they all have projects to migrate to VoIP in the near future. The latest-generation switches are therefore set to gradually take over the role of controlling public telephony infrastructure, giving a new lease of life to land line telephony services.

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About Cirpack

CIRPACK develops next-generation telephony platforms for operator infrastructures: Local Exchange and Transit switches with simultaneous native support for VoDSL, VoIP, VoWLL, VoCable, IP Centrex, ISDN PRI/BRI, POTS, as well as long distance telephony using any IP, ATM and TDM protocols. CIRPACK’s solutions are carrier-class softswitches and media/signalling gateways compliant with the IMS architecture. The CIRPACK technology enables operators to build robust wireline networks using standard-based components capable of delivering voice services to the mass market and providing seamless integration with mobile networks.

CIRPACK deployed the world's largest SoftSwitch-based PSTN as early as 1998 and is at the heart of the largest European VoIP services. The CIRPACK telephony platform is highly scalable to meet the need of small service providers having few customers as well as those of larger operators looking for multi-thousand E1 nodes. Developed in partnership with IBM, the CIRPACK technologies are the foundation of the new PSTN, leveraging previous investment to maintain existing services and ensuring a smooth migration.

CIRPACK works with industry leaders such as IBM Global Services to provide global solutions made of best-in-class element. CIRPACK is a European equipment vendor headquartered near Paris. For more information, please visit www.cirpack.com.