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D-Link is another company, which is pinning its hope on VoIP. KVSSS. Gunneswara Rao, director, D-Link India says, "One may see VoIP technology as part of the BPO, ITeS, Service Provider (bulk back haul), and IP Telephony segments, but VoIP is also dominating in government as well as the large enterprise space. In all segments together VoIP technology may be giving an additional yearly turnover of about Rs 1,000 crore, to IT and telecommunications which is growing."

IS SECURITY A DETERRENT?
Since IP telephony uses the existing IP network as its foundation, attacks on this data network can also adversely affect voice services. One of the most common threats is a denial-of-service attack, which shuts down an application or server. These attacks are often made against routers, and mail servers-but they can also target call-processing servers in IP telephony networks.

According to Cisco, security is not a deterrent to adoption of IP telephony. However, one needs to adopt a holistic approach and network security concerns need to be considered as IP Telephony can introduce unauthorized entry points into the network. For this it is imperative that converged networks enable converged security, which extends beyond traditional data security policies that address privacy of all the different elements comprising a network, including the IP Telephony traffic. So the IT architecture has to design IT security policies for voice and data without affecting the performance of mission critical applications.

VoIP utilization involving soft phones and software are vulnerable to worms, viruses and malware. Since these softphone applications run on user systems like PCs and PDAs, they are exposed and vulnerable to malicious code attacks in voice applications. Call tampering is also emerging as a threat.

According to Avaya, security is a valid concern because anyone can spoof into the IP network and get to hear the confidential conversation going on. Dinesh Sehgal of Avaya said, "Here (security) the role of vendors like us comes in as we ensure that all the discussions are confidential. We offer security inbuilt into the phones itself-we offer encryption on all our models of IP phones."

"We are using IP telephony in optimizing our existing infrastructure and communication cost in leveraging convergence technology" Pushpendu Roy, head, IT, Birlasoft

According to Nortel, security is one of the biggest concerns in IP telephony deployment. Says Sajan Paul head, Technology & Consulting, Enterprise Solutions, Nortel India, "However, there are newer protocols like Secure RTP (sRTP), signaling encryption and voice firewalls to take care of these issues. Unlike traditional TDM deployment , IP telephony needs a thorough network planning and disaster recovery design."

INTEGRATION CHALLENGES
IP gives the flexibility to an organization to choose its own pace to migrate and integrate IP Telephony with legacy systems. By integrating with most major legacy PBXs and voice-mail systems, as well as mission-critical business applications, most leading IP players empower customers to migrate based on their business needs instead of technology limitations.

Punja says, "Additionally, the idea of location-independent services in the network means that an enterprise can use a building-block approach for migrating its communications to IP on a site-by-site, group-by-group, or application-by-application basis. In fact, 99% of Cisco's customers migrate their networks to IP Communications using this approach."

Successful customer migration to IP communications is as much about process as it is about technology. Understanding this, leading industry players have developed detailed plans and processes that make migration smoother, faster, and easier for enterprises of all sizes.

To implement IP telephony the following checks on the existing network may be considered: electronic check and analysis of the total existing network for QoS; bandwidth estimation, as enterprises are increasing the load on the network with voice in addition to data; knowledge of the voice and data standards and protocols (implementation support); survey of wireless LAN, if there's wireless network; network redundancy, as voice network should not fail.

IP telephony is struggling to establish a foothold in the market since uptake of pure IP solutions is predominantly in greenfield opportunities. The exorbitantly high prices of IP phones is one of the major challenge that continues to hamper the growth of this market. Voice is carried over the network, which is shared by various applications. This causes time lag or poor voice quality at the receiver's end. Source: IDC

HURDLES IN THE WAY
Till recently, a single infrastructure was not allowed in India. However, with TRAI notifying approval for "logical partitioning" of public switched telephone network (PSTN) and closed user group (CUG) networks, enterprises, service providers, application software developers as well as Internet telephony vendors have a lot of reason to rejoice. Corporate users now can slash down the investment that goes into setting up networks as they would not have to manage the expense of two separate PSTN and CUG networks.

According to Punja of Cisco, "Interoperability is a major concern due to lack of standardization. However, with the adoption of standard protocol such as "SIP" in the call control engine, organizations can integrate their legacy or hybrid systems with Cisco IPT solutions thereby preserving their investment. However, full convergence would take more time but will further reduce cost and improve RoI for customers implementing IP Telephony."

Darryl Green, CEO, Tata Teleservices feels that the IP telephony market is yet to take off in India due to regulatory restrictions. According to him, "Domestic IP telephony is currently allowed only on a closed user group (CUG) setup and telecom operators are not permitted to use their existing infrastructure to offer IP Telephony services. While a few large enterprises have adopted IP telephony for their internal communication requirements, the market is very small. There is, however, huge potential with respect to this technology platform and it warrants focus from telecom operators and regulatory bodies."