Growing Up With Convergence

Convergence… isn’t it beautiful? We’ve come a long way from the world of TDM telephony, and even farther from the days of pure analog. Now, we’re connecting networks of networks of voice, video, and data together. First off, I’m happy to be blogging as part of the NetworkWorld community, especially on the topics of Convergence and Voice Over IP. Since this is my first post, I’ll be happy to provide a little bit of information about myself and what I hope to accomplish in the blog. The topic of converged networks is frankly very intriguing to me. Being 20 years old, I don’t remember the days of pure analog. From the time I could talk, AT&T/Lucent and Nortel had cornered the TDM and digital telephony market, and their Definity and Meridian platforms were implemented in thousands of organizations across the globe. It was literally ‘fact’ that enterprise users would have a full-featured terminal at their desks, with the capabilities of voicemail, ACD, and direct-dialing from one office to another over leased lines. From my point of view, I don’t know much different. Coming back to the present, I do believe that VoIP is here to stay. Any future development in telephony will have such a focus, where IP becomes the norm, and TDM the exception. But, we frankly have a long way to go. With the advancement of IP-telephony-related development, comes the responsibilities of securing such an environment, providing QoS, and maintaining the servers, switches, and routers that support the entire infrastructure. So, to wrap up my first post, I’m really hoping to cover the latest technological and product developments in convergence, but also to take a bird’s eye view to discuss architecture, security, implementation, and what some deployment and design best practices might be. Nevertheless, it’s important to note the rapid development of the open source platforms, especially Asterisk, as well as standards-based protocol development. Hopefully, we’ll all be able to understand this “new world” of VoIP a bit better as the features and benefits become even more apparent.