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Telecom Directions

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PCQ Bureau
New Update

For long, voice and data transmission needs have been treated separately,

with the voice part coming under the administration department. But that can no

longer be the case, what with data and voice transport converging at a furious

pace, and even the law of the land giving it the nod.

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Where is the catch?

If VoIP offers all the goodies that POTS (plain old telephone system) offers, and many more, what is holding up widespread adoption? The good old issue with pricing. While plain vanilla telephone costs less than Rs 1,000, pricing for IP phones starts at about Rs 15,000. Like with all technologies, it will take some time for IP phone sales to pick up volume, and for prices to come down.

Existing establishments will have a separate network to carry voice traffic

and a different one to carry data traffic. This necessitates the need for two

networks and associated costs of setup, maintenance and management. With

developments in network design and the emergence of convergence technologies,

data and voice traffic can now be integrated into the same internal network,

without loosing voice quality. Apart from reduction in overall equipment and

maintenance costs, additional benefits include easier and centralized

management, better uptimes, more feature-rich telephony, and prospects of

integrated video-conferencing too.

With integrated voice and data systems, your PCs and your telephones will

connect to the same network. In fact, your PC may well connect to the telephone,

which in turn is connected to the LAN. Your connect to the external world would

currently split into two, with the voice part connecting to the PSTN and the

data part connecting to the Internet or to WAN links. In the future, as these

two merge, this separation would no longer exist.

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The technology that makes this possible is VoIP (Voice over Internet

Protocol). Voice can be digitized (by sampling), compressed and encoded into

packets that can go over traditional data networks. The process is reversed on

the receiving end to get back the original voice.

Infrastructure requirements would be almost the same as in the case of a data

network–same hubs, network ports and switches. But your routers have to be

voice-enabled to transport the voice data and have the capability to handle

Quality of Service (Voice quality has to be maintained, so part of the band

width has to be dedicated to voice, or voice has to be given more preference

over data) and other service criteria. Also, your EPABX will now not be a

console, but a full-fledged server with associated networking equipment.

For the end-users, you will need IP-phones that connect to your LAN in the

same way as any other PC or network device would connect. These phones will be

identified with MAC addresses and IP addresses like any other network device.

IP-phones as we saw, would have a MAC address and are assigned IP addresses

by the controller software on a server. When an IP-phone instrument is connected

to a network, it is identified by its MAC address. A record of phone numbers,

rights and other settings is also kept on the server. The phone identifies

itself and retrieves all this data from the server and starts functioning. The

software also gives features like directory lookups, answering machine and a

host of other benefits.



It is not necessary that you have IP Phones only. Normal phones will work,
through special connectors. But they would not give you the additional features

that IP phones have, like directory search and auto configuration for example.

Ashish Sharma

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