Over the past several years, leading infrastructure vendors and owners have made the Internet more accommodating to real-time voice conversations. Smarter routers can recognize a voice session and give it bandwidth priority. Media gateways can bridge the gap between the Internet and circuit-switched telephone networks.
New protocols can signal one gateway to link with another.
Plenty, according to a range of development tools providers, service providers and next-generation application developers. As the concepts of integrating centralized customer service and web self-help begin to take hold, we fully expect this technology to be a category killer. Yet, the ability to develop voice-enabled applications to run on either or both of these networks is a done deal, thanks to advances in routing, signaling, gateway and compression technologies. The promise of Internet media convergence through open systems interfaces is well proven. At press time, an IETF SIP working group continued to move the SIP standard, including descriptions of SIP-based app development, from proposal to draft stage.