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.