The current move towards a more fragmented workplace with multiple sites dispersed geographically, plus pressure from various governments for more flexible working regimes has resulted in the creation of a mobile workforce. This trend has been a major factor in the rise in popularity and deployment of IP telephony Recent findings from analyst Gartner predict that, by 2005, over 70% of telephone system sales will be for IP-centric platforms. But who would benefit from IP telephony and what is the best way of embracing it to yield optimum benefits? First of all, for those who may be unfamiliar with this technology, what is IP telephony? Voice over IP (VoIP) or IP telephony is a means of making telephone calls over a data network instead of via the traditional analogue public switched telephone network (PSTN). When making a call using the PSTN, analogue lines are kept open between channels for the duration of the call, which is known as circuit switching. But using small segments of the network exclusively for one call is extremely inefficient, as callers are effectively blocking this part of the network for their call duration. In IP telephony voice is first converted into packets of digital data. These packets are then transmitted over a single network such as the LAN (local area network) or WAN (wide area network), which gives the benefit of 'free' calls between sites, just as if one were calling an internal extension.
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