IT EXPO: Faster networks and beyond 'Best Effort'

We've all had a weekend to decompress the news and information we absorbed at IT EXPO last week and I thought I'd round up some of the interesting things I got a chance to hear about and discuss while hanging out in the press room and exploring the show floor.

Bigger data pipes and broadband access are going to drive the more flashy technologies on the VoIP horizon, while also insuring that the bread and butter of VoIP becomes ubiquitous. Like Skype CSO, Christoper Dean said in his keynote, 4G will be the inflection point that will bring Mobile VoIP and perhaps even video calls to consumers on the move, while the 3G pipe is probably holding back innovation on new forms of Mobile communication. On the wired side, a number of things will need to happen to make mass HD voice and video calling penetration a reality. Faster networks that can guarantee the same quality from end-to-end while avoiding the PSTN will be necessary if we really want to see some cool stuff reach mass usage.

With so much more opportunity to switch businesses away from their traditional PSTN calling systems, our industry has been coming up with great ways to insure reliability, allow for the use of older technology while moving to IP, and develop ways to connect traditional calls to SIP as well as connections between different SIP codecs. I spoke with Ingate and Dialogic about how SIP Trunking really has become the catalyst driving a lot of innovation for conversion to IP and their any-to-any solution. Aculab told me about how they were delivering business-critical reliability with their dual-redundant SIP service, a solution that shows we are moving away from the idea of 'best effort' reliability while still delivering all the increased functionality that IP communications have to offer. If the FCC's broadband stimulus dreams come true we will need to continue making the transition easier through things like SIP. And, if we one day do have an all-IP network, we will need to make sure we have a 'beyond best effort' infrastructure in place so that our critical communication systems are always available like we have all grown to expect.

It was nice meeting with so many great companies in our industry, hearing about how they do business and also hearing feedback on FierceVoIP. In the coming months, I am looking forward to bringing you stories on how all their new and innovative offerings are being used to make it easier for companies to upgrade to IP communications and what IP has done to help them do business better. -Mike