A conference next month at the Illinois Institute of Technology blending academia and industry will feature AT&T and Verizon executives examining the future of VoIP.
The 6th Annual VoIP Conference and Expo will be held October 13 and 14 at the school's Rice campus in Wheaton. The opening keynote presentations on the 14th by Mike Paradise, AVP of global network operations at AT&T and Chris Mayer, vice president of systems integration and testing at Verizon, will address how carriers will integrate and deliver IP-based, Web-based and mobile services into their infrastructures and business models.
Paradise says they also will address the reasons why companies and carriers should be investing in VoIP. Paradise runs the AT&T worldwide IP network and comes at his work from both a technology and operational point of view. He says the “if" question about VoIP was answered long ago and that academia is good about teaching students how to build VoIP infrastructure and services.
“But I want to focus on why they should be investing in VoIP, not how they should build the network," Paradise said. “And I’ll talk about the things they need to keep in mind when they try to develop their VoIP infrastructure."
Paradise said that when it comes to VoIP, businesses and consumers are not going to care about the underlying technology they use for voice. “So it’s more dependent on reducing costs, making sure that operationally you can meet your cost drivers. The other aspect is trying to build the technology on an IP network that has the service characteristics you have come to know for 25 years."
He said his talk will focus on scale and why it makes sense – even for a network that has millions of circuit-switched voice customers in an embedded infrastructure that has been paid for 20 years over and still works well – to implement an IP based solution.
The session will cover increasingly essential topics such as geographic redundancy and how to respond to a failure at the edge of the network and move millions of sessions somewhere else.
The session also will explore the new dimensions for VoIP and dig into the two primary drivers for investing in VoIP: the opportunity to reduce costs and the opportunity to increase revenue through service bundling. “AT&T’s U-verse is a good example of bundling video, phone and Internet on a single broadband connection," Paradise said.
In addition to scale and revenue opportunities, the session will discuss the importance of quality and having the operational chops, or metrics, to prove it.
“Traditional 4E and 5E infrastructure has been out there for 20 to 30 years; we know how to operate it very well. It is stagnant from a feature function point of view and over time you become more efficient at an operational level," Paradise said. “In a packet-based network, you have diff things to worry about. It Is not stagnant, The IP network is essentially a common services network for all services, be they VoIP, 4G, LTE, etc. so operationally you have to worry about things like packet loss, jitter, performance and latency that you didn’t have to worry about before."
You also have to start worrying about different traffic control mechanisms for large-scale global networks. “In TDM where you can take down trunking or reroute around a switch, the concepts are different in a packet network. You have to think about traffic control in a whole different layer than in TDM," he said.
This kick-off session for a mixed crowd from academia and business will address both the hows and whys of doing VoIP. “Our colleges and universities are very good at teaching the theoretical. Great engineers come out of these schools knowing how to implement the technology. They understand the bits and bytes. You can put them in a room and they will figure out how to do anything. But why? You have to know why you want to do something or make a change. You can’t invest billions without knowing the ROI," Paradise said.
