REGULATION AND SECURITY TO SHAPE VoIP STANDARDS, EXPERTS SAY

Two-day summit was hosted by Alliance for Telecommunications Industry Solutions (ATIS) Standards Committee T1 to gather information to help develop open industry standards for carrier VoIP networks. Event opened with panel of executives from BellSouth, SBC, Nextel and AT&T describing what telcos expect and would require from VoIP standards. Subsequent technical sessions, which continue today (Aug. 14), featured work underway in 12 standards groups and industry organizations including ITU-T, IETF, Committee T1 and TIA. Committee T1 Chmn. Raymond Hapeman called meetings “a sanity check.” “There’s been a lot of [VoIP development] activity in many areas,” he said. “We intend to look over the information collected over 2 days to see what’s missing. If a carrier turns on a [VoIP] system a year from now, we don’t want to find a piece missing.” Goal is single set of VoIP standards that can encompass ILECs, long distance companies, wireless providers and others.

Set of standards to create interoperable IP network capable of replacing today’s circuit switched network is technically daunting, and participants will be advised not to consider regulatory implications, SBC Vp-New Products Eva Low told us. “We've asking them to build the very best network possible and we'll worry about the regulators later,” she said, though regulation is never far from her mind. Large regulated telcos may have stronger incentive to cooperate on open industry standards than smaller companies, Hapeman said. His committee especially is concerned about development of standards to manage transactions between carriers. “If carriers won’t cooperate on this, it is likely a regulator will eventually step in and tell them ‘you'll do it my way,'” he said.

Standards for VoIP “can be a path for recovery” for sick industry, Smith said. “Voice over IP is such a big transition, it is very important we get it right.” If major carriers “go off in different directions that are not compatible, it would be adding insult to injury,” he said. Industry wants to avoid another ISDN, Low said, referring to Bell data service that was commercial failure due in part to fragmented standards. Carriers should adopt VoIP because it is platform to build new services, Smith said: “If I was looking for a new technology for voice calls, I wouldn’t be interested in voice over IP.” The value of VoIP is potential of much richer interface for customer services. “Today customers have 12 switches and a switch hook,” he said. VoIP promises Web-based service management and real-time service provisioning as well as advanced services such as audio or video conferencing or personalization of services. “Some of these services have existed for some time, but… implementing them on the existing [PSTN] was very expensive, which made the take rate very low,” he said.

In order to deliver “anything” on VoIP network, open industry standards must meet 5 key requirements, Low said: (1) Network integration and interoperability require simplification of protocol choices and"accelerating the development of stable, standardized interfaces.” Backward compatibility needs to be assured with standards providing “a graceful way to transition.” (2) End-to-end quality of service criteria and service metrics that cover 4 “classical dimensions” of bandwidth management, latency, jitter control and packet loss. All of these metrics affect customer perceptions of service, she said. (3) Effective network security, carrier grade (99.999%) reliability and “graceful scalability” that can serve millions of customers. (4) Unified and standardized element/network management system interfaces that allow meaningful troubleshooting and trouble correlation “across various pieces of a distributed architecture.” (5) Standardization of customer premises equipment and user interfaces -- the lack of which sunk ISDN, May said.

“Security is the voice over IP showstopper,” said AT&T Labs Vp-Development Eberhard Wunderlich. Unless VoIP networks are secured from same type of cyberattacks that plague Internet, VoIP will be “limited to well-contained niche applications,” he said. He recommended comprehensive standards to protect VoIP networks from denial of service attacks. As VoIP becomes fundamental architecture of phone system, it “becomes a back door that makes national and international infrastructure unavailable in an emergency,” he warned. Also needed is signaling security from customers and for links between carriers both for privacy and to avoid theft of service. On subject of network reliability, Wunderlich noted that VoIP currently is niche application that falls back on the PSTN. “In the future there won’t be another network for voice over IP to fall back on.”