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Fast-tracking communications with VoIP.

Article Excerpt
There is a new mode of communications transportation arriving at transit agencies. It offers cost savings, ready deployment of next-generation contact center solutions and enables information-richer interactions.

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This method is voice over Internet protocol or (VoIP or IP), defined by Newton's Telecom Dictionary as phone calls transmitted over data networks, which can be the public Internet, internal corporate networks or managed networks by communications carriers. The "Internet protocol," or IP, is a catchall term for describing protocols and technology that enable such calls to be encoded as data and routed as such from origins to destinations.

Richard "Zippy" Grigonis is executive editor, Internet Telephony, a trade publication covering VoIP, and is author of The Computer Telephony Encyclopedia and the Dictionary of IP Communications. He contrasts IP with the traditional public service telephone network (PSTN), which relies on time-division multiplex (TDM) communications technology.

IP breaks continuous voice into many packets that are transmitted independently to a destination and then reassembled. E-mail and Web chat is handled in a similar fashion. In contrast, PSTN/TDM is a continuous connection over an open circuit between two points. The connection remains open, occupying bandwidth, even if there are pauses in conversations.

IP can therefore piggyback onto existing data networks including to the CAT 5 data outlets provided to computer-equipped workstations. Existing PSTN networks can be seamlessly and affordably migrated to IP if organizations have hybrid IP-PSTN or IP-capable PSTN switches.

As IP is data, it does face security threats when being transported over the public Internet. Yet it can be readily guarded against these intrusions like data is by using virtual private networks (VPNs). VPNs provide protection through authentication, encryption and tunneling, the latter being encapsulating the encrypted data/IP packets for secure transmission.

"Packet-switched networks are 'connectionless' and therefore long pauses do not consume bandwidth, which makes them cheaper than PSTN for voice and data," explains Grigonis. "Voice is simply treated as another form of packetized data. Packetization enables the same data 'pipe' to be used efficiently among multiple users of various applications, of which voice is just one."

TRANSIT AGENCY BENEFITS

VoIP supplies several key benefits:

Reduced trunking, calling and server costs: IP calls, because it is data and treated as such, is much less expensive per call than those transported by PSTN. It...

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