P2P VoIP ushering in a new era in telephony

According to some telecommunications industry experts the evolution of VoIP to a distributed peer-to-peer (P2P) environment is going to radically change the rules of the telephony game. But P2P won't do it alone - it needs the help of standards-based session initiation protocol (SIP), and just as VoIP affected the conventional telecom world, P2P SIP will change VoIP. David Bryan, founder of SIPeerior Technologies, said P2P SIP will precipitate major changes in both the enterprise and carrier spaces. He believes the industry is at the beginning of a P2P SIP groundswell. "Some of the earliest examples were services like Skype and some of the enterprise P2P Voice over IP applications, but there will be more," he stated. The biggest impact of P2P SIP will likely be lower costs, Bryan said. Low-cost carriers and zero-cost voice services are entirely possible with P2P SIP, he noted during pulvermedia's P2P SIP will do to VoIP what VoIP has done to the PSTN webinar last month. Skype is the first service that comes to mind when thinking of peer-based telephony, but standards-based SIP can take this type of model further, according to Bryan. "In this case you end up with a very low-cost alternate carrier where you don't have any regular carrier involved," he said, adding this type of carrier is distributed over the Internet. In the future, this approach could eliminate the carrier altogether, Bryan added. "You could end up with a global system where you essentially have all the users participating together and providing that sort of service with no carrier what so ever." Even if this were to happen, telephony infrastructure would still be required to connect to the conventional telephone network, he added.In the shorter term, it's more realistic that carriers would use this type of technology to cluster their IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) servers as a way to distribute the load among a number of them. But Bryan noted carriers could also push P2P SIP to the device level so as to eliminate the servers altogether which would allow them to "deploy what basically amounts to zero-cost voice services. Of course, we're going to see this would be very disruptive to the carriers and it'll be interesting to see how that jibes with their business models." But the impact of P2P SIP-based telephony systems won't be limited to the carrier world, the enterprise space will also be affected. While the large enterprise sector is already well-versed in VoIP and has invested to realize the benefits, the very small business has been on the outside looking in. Bryan said that P2P SIP can make VoIP a reality for this type of company. Without the need for a centralized telephony configuration due to the self-organizing nature of P2P systems, the very small enterprise can bring this type of system in. "Today, very, very small enterprises are worried about having to bring in a systems administrator," he said. "Because these systems are self-organizing it gives us an opportunity to move Voice over IP into very, very small enterprises - five-person, 10-person companies." P2P SIP-based systems can also grow with the company and small companies don't have to worry about buying a system that is limited in the number of seats it can serve. "So it's very easy to scale from a three-person to a 10-person all the way to a larger 50-person type of system," stated Bryan.

P2P VoIP ushering in a new era in telephony

News | 05/07/2007 1:40 pm EDT

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