advantages cited for VoIP. They are as far reaching as they are controversial. Some of the advantages to the business user included: Cost reduction, simplification, consolidation, advanced applications, backward compatibility, new revenue streams, and more efficient infrastructures. Cost reduction will be seen across the board from cheaper to “free” long distance calling to less investment in hardware and software. This will be extremely beneficial to those companies with international markets. It will be more cost effective for a business to maintain one network than two separate ones. Standardization of a voice/data network will reduce total equipment costs as well. Network managers will have to assume the role of managing voice packets and protocol as well as data. VoIP is backward compatible with video conferencing and other applications already in place in many organizations and it supports multimedia applications and multiservice applications, something the traditional phone service cannot compete with.There are several obstacles that VoIP must overcome. Latency is one of the largest obstacles facing this technology. Latency is the delay or time between packets that have the same destination and compose the same message. If there is latency between voice packets this will cause the conversation to be choppy and unintelligible. VoIP expends and average of 40 to 60 msecs of delay per gateway. That kind of overhead gets noticed pretty quickly, especially when you are traversing multiple gateways. Interoperability is another key issue. The best way to date for voice traffic to travel from an IP network to PSTN is Media Gateway Control Protocol (MGCP). This protocol allows an ISP’s switch server to manage and control SS7 switches on a PSTN, and the gateways on an IP network. Security, reliability, and training are also drawbacks too fully integrating VoIP within an organization. Security is an is...
