THE NETWORK LETTER: VoIP in erspective

摘要

G. Keith Cambron, President and CEO of SBC Labs, is sleeping just fine at night. Given the declining base of telephone company access lines in service, you might think he would be feeling the pressure from VoIP providers. But Mr. Cambron sees VoIP not as a threat but as an evolution of technology. He looks at VoIP as just the first of an emerging array of multimedia services for which SBC is building a separate network. As for those upstart VoIP service providers, Mr. Cambron also doesn't seem to believe that consumers will be quick to buy a different kind of voice service just to save a nickle. The price elasticity is gone. Consumer choice is more likely to be driven by new multimedia features, similar to current trends in mobile telephony. For the telcos, however, there are powerful internal business drivers to adopt VoIP technology. The challenge for an incumbent operator is that due to fundamental differences between circuit and packet technology, there is no easy way to make the conversion from TDM to IP. That is why SBC decided to build a separate VoIP network from scratch. What follows is a summary of SBC's economic and technical arguments for, and against, circuit-to-packet migration.