VOIP and 21CN

[Monteey]

Just been watched the Money Programme on the huge growth of Internet/VOIP telephony and how it looks like it going to be a huge competitor to the traditional PSTN even mobile system. I found it fascinating, how programs like Skype are revolutionising the way we communicate.

Personally i think this is just the beginning and will not be surprised to see the decline in conventional telephony over the coming years as this type of communication takes off to the wider market.

BT are taking action launching their 21CN which i think someone mentioned on here a while ago, converting their entire system to IP, interesting stuff.

[j.paul]

Some more info for you to read

the UK resource for IP Telephony

[ian.cant]

More here also

[Guest MrMcauber]

I have to agree with you Monteey, still relatively early days right now and it seems that whats really happening now is the implementation of current telephony running over an IP network, but as time goes by I expect phones to become much more inteligent devices incorporating much more functionality as standard.

Not only that, because VoIP in itself is not a proprietary system - as many manufacturers systems are - I expect things to change quite dramatically in terms of office based pbx systems too.

For example, there is already an open source IP telephony system out there in the form of Asterisk (http://www.asterisk.org/) which will run on a pretty low spec Linux box. I believe some call centres have already used Asterisk. I've had a brief play with it, and I reckon with a few rough edges taken off and a decent GUI it will be much more user friendly... I'm planning on spending some decent time with it later in the year....

It would not suprise me if some company did not start selling IP PBX boxes with a Linux system embedded in much the same way as you can buy a firewall/router for just over £100 now. Since you can't sell Linux or Open Source software they could only charge for the hardware, and if they made the user interface pretty simple to use it would catch on!

Then you get companies like SipGate (www.sipgate.co.uk); you can have a free IP Telephone service (you need to buy an IP phone); you obviously have to pay for outgoing calls and you can also integrate into the Asterisk system mentioned above. I've got one as a second number for my business, theres been a few hic-cupos with the service (I would not use it as my main line yet) but give it time it will be fine, and the quality over a 1MB NTL cable link has been great so far...

Gary