Early returns look promising. Cisco claims to have shipped more than 300,000 packet telephony ports in the first half of its 1999 fiscal year. But Cisco will have plenty of competition and a raft of new challenges as it ventures off into the voice world. That's a major challenge. Incumbent on that challenge is another - reliability.
Cisco acknowledges that packet telephony is still an immature technology.
But people are not waiting for everything to be perfect before they start their transitions. In addition to service availability, service quality will be another challenge for Cisco. Data networks drop data packets, but that just cannot happen with voice. For service quality and reliability reasons, Cisco users are weighing packet telephony cautiously. We've got pretty good contracts for long distance with our carrier and because of that, packet telephony doesn't make sense in some locations until the technology's a little more mature.