Changing telecom industry meets in Vegas

U.S. carriers and infrastructure providers are gathering this week at the Telecom '04 trade show in Las Vegas amid rapid changes in the telecommunications industry, including cable companies roaring into the voice business and phone companies switching on TV services.

VoIP and the "triple play" of bundled voice, video and data services are among the hot topics at the show, which is sponsored by the U.S. Telecom Association and runs Sunday through Wednesday. Executives of the nation's biggest incumbent carriers and cable operators, as well as three commissioners of the U.S. Federal Communications Commission, will address industry participants at the show, which is expected to draw about 5,000 attendees.

While consumer VoIP services from providers such as Vonage grab headlines, VoIP is now starting to enter the mainstream in business, with large deployments announced recently at Ford Motor Co. and Bank of America. On Monday at Telecom '04, VeriSign introduced a service to help VoIP carriers offer a richer set of services on IP calls that travel over the PSTN.

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U.S. carriers and infrastructure providers are gathering this week at the Telecom '04 trade show in Las Vegas amid rapid changes in the telecommunications industry, including cable companies roaring into the voice business and phone companies switching on TV services.

VoIP and the "triple play" of bundled voice, video and data services are among the hot topics at the show, which is sponsored by the U.S. Telecom Association and runs Sunday through Wednesday. Executives of the nation's biggest incumbent carriers and cable operators, as well as three commissioners of the U.S. Federal Communications Commission, will address industry participants at the show, which is expected to draw about 5,000 attendees.

While consumer VoIP services from providers such as Vonage grab headlines, VoIP is now starting to enter the mainstream in business, with large deployments announced recently at Ford Motor Co. and Bank of America. On Monday at Telecom '04, VeriSign introduced a service to help VoIP carriers offer a richer set of services on IP calls that travel over the PSTN.

While VoIP systems use the SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) and VXML (Voice Extensible Markup Language) protocols to communicate information about calls, the PSTN uses SS7 (Signaling System 7). VeriSign is introducing protocol conversion between the systems. With one IP connection to VeriSign, a VoIP carrier or Internet service provider can have the signaling for its calls converted to SS7 and carried over the public network.

VoIP's usefulness is limited today because it exists in islands, said Tom Kershaw, vice president of VoIP services at VeriSign. The signals for special services such as blind transfer (transferring a call and hanging up before the line is picked up) may work on a certain type of PBX on one enterprise LAN or one VoIP service provider's network, but not on the public phone network or on other PBXes, Kershaw said. That's a barrier to more advanced services such as IP videoconferencing, he said.

"If your company runs one data network and one type of PBX and one type of security infrastructure, then you can do it. But otherwise, you have to worry about, 'How do I make these networks work together?'" Kershaw said.

With VeriSign's new SIP-7 Services, announced Monday, carriers can connect to VeriSign's SS7 infrastructure via a SIP-enabled softswitch and a secure IP VPN. VeriSign's network can link them into carrier networks throughout North America and, optionally, some carrier networks in Europe, Kershaw said. It will save these providers the cost of equipment and personnel needed to handle SS7, he said.

Business VoIP is "out of the sandbox" and entering mainstream use, but it still has interoperability problems when it comes to advanced features, because vendors keep adding their own extensions to industry standards, according to Yankee Group analyst Jim Slaby.

VeriSign, a newcomer to telephony, apparently solved this problem through "brute force," said Yankee Group analyst Zeus Kerravala, who was briefed by VeriSign on the new offering.

The IDG News Service is a Network World affiliate.