Implementation of VoIP is growing rapidly. There will also be further convergence of media, data, voice and video. In order to achieve these further levels of convergence, interoperability and continued work on standards will be critical. SIP is emerging as the major protocol to underpin IP-based advanced services.

Another key driver will be the development of wireless VoIP, which will provide students and staff with different ways to access learning environments while integrated services will open up the possibilities of ubiquitous computing. In future, learning may take place in a shared virtual world of social computing, similar to an online, multiplayer game, and VoIP will be one of the components of such an environment.

VoIP gateways have become the world’s de facto standard in building voice and video over IP products and services. These gateways provide real-time voice and video IP communications. Many large SMEs are already looking to VoIP service providers for their needs. Many developing countries are also looking to VoIP to provide services to remote areas that are currently not reachable through traditional means.

Today, hundreds of thousands of people around the world use commercially deployed IP-centric products and services for next generation networks. However, the focus now is not just getting the VoIP service running but in delivering secure and high quality services.

There are two Telecom Providers in Thailand. TOT Corporation (formerly, the Telephone Organization of Thailand) to serve a Domestic voice communications and CAT Corporation (formerly, the Communication Authority of Thailand) serves an International voice communications and Data communications. TOT and CAT are both operators and regulators. They give concessions based on the BTO scheme to winning bidders on selected services. The concessions could be of the same kind due to overlapping roles and authority.

QoS of VoIP in Thailand. No QoS enforced both in terms of latency and accessibility. TOT VoIP domestic service claims to have delay comparable to that of mobile phones. CAT VoIP international service still faces problems about accessibility and latency.

Future Directions (Thailand)

The establishment of the National Telecommunications Committee (NTC) as an independent regulatory body. The Telecommunications Act is in the approval process from the Parliament. Long-term policy goal is set for liberalization.

VoIP in Other SEA Countries

Malaysia, the Philippines, and Singapore has VoIP licenses. Cambodia and Laos are available but still illegal. Cambodian military police have detained 20 foreigners on an alleged IDD bypass scam using an unlicensed IDD gateway. For Vietnam, the Posts and Telematics Ministry has suspended the sales of FPT Telecom’s Internet phone card service. Allow only outbound Internet-based calls from computers to computers and from computers to telephones while prohibiting inbound Internet phone calls.

QoS of VoIP in SEA. Only Singapore has clear QoS results on System Accessibility, Service Activation and Number of complaints. Philippines ask for QoS but does not enforce. Thailand has informal user surveys.

Future of VoIP in SEA

Move toward enterprise VoIP and Private leased-line infrastructure. IP telephony gateway over conventional PABX. More consolidation.

In basic terms, it can lower the phone bills, deliver a wider range of unique services and improve employee productivity.

But while cost savings are keys, enhanced functionality and mobility are also huge factors in VoIP’s growing appeal. VoIP simply does things that are extremely expensive, or even impossible, with traditional phone networks. For example, many users enjoy the convenience of having their voicemail system notify them by text-message or e-mail whenever a new message arrives.

Best of all, most VoIP providers offer flat-priced bundles for both high-speed data and voice. One fixed monthly cost provides a fast, reliable Internet connection, as well as unlimited local and long-distance calling. While the initial investment in specialized VoIP equipment could involve significant up-front cost, that equipment generally pays for itself by reducing voice and data service costs and eliminating long-distance calling costs, within the first 12-18 months or even sooner.

Cost Savings

· Calls can be made between multiple offices for free using inexpensive equipment and an existing Internet connection

· Unlimited voicemail boxes

· No need for separate cabling since both data and voice are sent over the same network

Mobility

· Users can take their phone to another office or anywhere around the world and still receive calls at the normal number with any standard Internet connection

Functionality

· Easily integrates with contact list in contact databases, including Microsoft Outlook. Simply click on a contact and the phone will start dialing.

· Incoming calls can automatically activate pertinent information for that caller, which can enhance customer service

* Users can check and configure voicemail through an Internet web portal

“The Internet has forever changed the way that we view images and receive information, now it’s transforming the way we talk to one another. It’s an amazing technology that has wide ranging implications for today’s cost- and customer-conscious businesses,” states Jason.

Implementation of VoIP is growing rapidly. There will also be further convergence of media, data, voice and video. In order to achieve these further levels of convergence, interoperability and continued work on standards will be critical. SIP is emerging as the major protocol to underpin IP-based advanced services.

Another key driver will be the development of wireless VoIP, which will provide students and staff with different ways to access learning environments while integrated services will open up the possibilities of ubiquitous computing. In future, learning may take place in a shared virtual world of social computing, similar to an online, multiplayer game, and VoIP will be one of the components of such an environment.

VoIP gateways have become the world’s de facto standard in building voice and video over IP products and services. These gateways provide real-time voice and video IP communications. Many large SMEs are already looking to VoIP service providers for their needs. Many developing countries are also looking to VoIP to provide services to remote areas that are currently not reachable through traditional means.

Today, hundreds of thousands of people around the world use commercially deployed IP-centric products and services for next generation networks. However, the focus now is not just getting the VoIP service running but in delivering secure and high quality services.

There are two Telecom Providers in Thailand. TOT Corporation (formerly, the Telephone Organization of Thailand) to serve a Domestic voice communications and CAT Corporation (formerly, the Communication Authority of Thailand) serves an International voice communications and Data communications. TOT and CAT are both operators and regulators. They give concessions based on the BTO scheme to winning bidders on selected services. The concessions could be of the same kind due to overlapping roles and authority.

QoS of VoIP in Thailand. No QoS enforced both in terms of latency and accessibility. TOT VoIP domestic service claims to have delay comparable to that of mobile phones. CAT VoIP international service still faces problems about accessibility and latency.

Future Directions (Thailand)

The establishment of the National Telecommunications Committee (NTC) as an independent regulatory body. The Telecommunications Act is in the approval process from the Parliament. Long-term policy goal is set for liberalization.

VoIP in Other SEA Countries

Malaysia, the Philippines, and Singapore has VoIP licenses. Cambodia and Laos are available but still illegal. Cambodian military police have detained 20 foreigners on an alleged IDD bypass scam using an unlicensed IDD gateway. For Vietnam, the Posts and Telematics Ministry has suspended the sales of FPT Telecom’s Internet phone card service. Allow only outbound Internet-based calls from computers to computers and from computers to telephones while prohibiting inbound Internet phone calls.

QoS of VoIP in SEA. Only Singapore has clear QoS results on System Accessibility, Service Activation and Number of complaints. Philippines ask for QoS but does not enforce. Thailand has informal user surveys.

Future of VoIP in SEA

Move toward enterprise VoIP and Private leased-line infrastructure. IP telephony gateway over conventional PABX. More consolidation.

In basic terms, it can lower the phone bills, deliver a wider range of unique services and improve employee productivity.

But while cost savings are keys, enhanced functionality and mobility are also huge factors in VoIP’s growing appeal. VoIP simply does things that are extremely expensive, or even impossible, with traditional phone networks. For example, many users enjoy the convenience of having their voicemail system notify them by text-message or e-mail whenever a new message arrives.

Best of all, most VoIP providers offer flat-priced bundles for both high-speed data and voice. One fixed monthly cost provides a fast, reliable Internet connection, as well as unlimited local and long-distance calling. While the initial investment in specialized VoIP equipment could involve significant up-front cost, that equipment generally pays for itself by reducing voice and data service costs and eliminating long-distance calling costs, within the first 12-18 months or even sooner.

Cost Savings

· Calls can be made between multiple offices for free using inexpensive equipment and an existing Internet connection

· Unlimited voicemail boxes

· No need for separate cabling since both data and voice are sent over the same network

Mobility

· Users can take their phone to another office or anywhere around the world and still receive calls at the normal number with any standard Internet connection

Functionality

· Easily integrates with contact list in contact databases, including Microsoft Outlook. Simply click on a contact and the phone will start dialing.

· Incoming calls can automatically activate pertinent information for that caller, which can enhance customer service

* Users can check and configure voicemail through an Internet web portal

“The Internet has forever changed the way that we view images and receive information, now it’s transforming the way we talk to one another. It’s an amazing technology that has wide ranging implications for today’s cost- and customer-conscious businesses,” states Jason.

The type of VoIP implementation most well known to consumers and students uses client-based, peer-to-peer (P2P) technologies such as Napster and Skype (Jones, 2005). P2P systems are far more decentralized than other networking or computer systems, with little or no reliance on the idea of clients being served by a central server. Clients (individual computers or telephony end points) act as nodes and are as likely to be ‘providing’ resources to other nodes (its peers) as to be consuming them from other nodes.

It is fairly well known within higher and further education that such client-based P2P applications can cause problems on IP networks because they make it much harder to manage the use of bandwidth and to exercise some level of control over the use of the network. There are particular problems with applications such as Kazaa and Napster, which are used to download music, films and games and the challenge is growing with the further development of P2P applications such as BitTorrent and Groove Networks’ Virtual Office, and the increasing popularity of instant messaging (IM) which is also a P2P application (see section 3.2 for more on IM). The use of Skype within college networks has raised similar concerns.

Many institutions see Skype as a good thing as it enables overseas students to keep in touch with their families at low cost and, as a consumer technology, has encouraged renewed interest in the potential for new developments in distance learning. However, because of the way it works, Skype is also considered by many to pose potential security threats, as well as possibly creating a major overhead on the network over which it is running.

Skype works by forming an ad hoc decentralized network of ordinary nodes and super nodes. The only centralized service is the Skype login server that stores user login and password details: the handling of voice calls is undertaken entirely by the decentralized network of nodes and super nodes. In order to make a telephone call, ordinary nodes must connect to an available super node (Baset and Schulzrinne, 2004). In this arrangement ‘any node with a public IP address having sufficient CPU, memory and network bandwidth is a candidate to become a super node’ and a Skype client “cannot prevent itself from becoming a super node” (Baset and Schulzrinne, 2004, pp.1 and 2).

In addition to the concerns over bandwidth usage it is worth remarking that Skype differs from some of the other VoIP services in that it is based on the company’s own, proprietary protocols, rather than the standard SIP protocol and one implication of this is that Skype users can only connect with other Skype users (Jones, 2005). Skype is not the only IP telephony system and that ‘Alternatives that are standards-based may prove easier to manage and provide a more predictable service’. For example, VoIP systems such as the Gizmo Project use the SIP protocol and can connect effortlessly to multiple VoIP networks and SIP-based PBX systems.

A further consideration with regard to Skype is that it is considered by many to pose a potential security threat because of the way it works. Skype traffic is encrypted and uses a random combination of IP addresses and ports. This means it is hard to detect Skype calls because they run through their own, encrypted ‘tunnel’ over a network and there is concern that this is a possible way in which viruses or other problems could be introduced into a network, without being easily detected (Blackwell, 2005).

It is possible to block unauthorized Skype traffic. Blocking specific types of traffic over an IP network is usually done by blocking ports or denying access to specific IP addresses. But Skype traffic, because of the way it travels over the network and in particular its use of random combinations of IP addresses and ports, causes problems for traditional port blocking filters.

Skype traffic can be identified, and therefore blocked, by investigating the headers of every IP packet crossing the network. The challenge is to do this quickly, so other network services are not affected. VoIP blocking is often a function added to existing network or security management software, such as Narus’s IP Platform, Verso Technologies’ NetSpective 2.0, and SonicWALL’s enterprise appliances. Other systems able to help manage and control IP networks include Ellacoya’s IP Service Control System, Sandvine Broadband Network Management, and software from P-Cube, now owned by Cisco.

A proxy appliance, widely used to apply controls to Web traffic, can also be used to block specified unwanted traffic, including voice calls, if necessary. Deep Packet Inspection is another approach, developed from firewall technology that can also assist in intrusion detection and prevention.

List of some common VoIP softwares

· Skype

· GoogleTalk

· Windows Live Messenger

· Yahoo! Messenger

As already mentioned, the traditional PSTN telephone infrastructure has been built up over the last one hundred years or so and has developed into a highly reliable voice communications system. In contrast, VoIP is a relatively new technology with a fledgling architecture that is built on inherently less reliable data networks. This means that there are therefore justifiable concerns around the extent to which it is deployed. The purpose of this section is to examine the underlying protocols and technologies used in VoIP and to discuss the potential challenges inherent in their deployment.

Most people are aware of VoIP through the Skype consumer telephone service which has gained large-scale public recognition recently, particularly since its purchase by Ebay. However, VoIP has not suddenly appeared in the last few years as an opportunity afforded by the World Wide Web. Skype is only one particular implementation of VoIP and its related technologies and it is important to understand that VoIP has an important technological history, intertwined with the telecommunications industry in general, in order to appreciate the complexities of VoIP technologies and applications.

The idea of voice over IP has been discussed since the 1970s but it was the mid-1990s before commercial products became available with the introduction, in 1995, by Israeli company Vocaltec, of the first commercial system (Varshney et al., 2002). These early VoIP systems were designed to connect one PC to another and required each PC to have a sound card, speakers, microphone, modem and VoIP software. The software encoded and compressed the voice signal, converting it into IP packets that could be transmitted over the Internet. With this approach, both users used headsets, plugged into their PCs. The calls could only be made between PCs and could not connect to the PSTN network.

In parallel, from the 1970s onwards, traditional telecommunications carrier companies were developing new systems that introduced IP-enabling software for traditional telephony equipment. Human speech is an analogue wave signal and historically, voice telephone calls had been made over networks using analogue circuits which provided a temporary end-to-end connection, through the network, for each call (Sherburne and Fitzgerald, 2004). This is known as circuit switched, and builds on the original phone network of local telephone exchanges, in which wires between households were literally connected together for the duration of the call by a telephone operator. The companies that provided these services were often public agencies, usually part of a country’s post office service, and such networks became known as Post Office Telephone Systems (POTS), sometimes also referred to (post privatization) as Plain Old Telephone Systems. The Public Switched Telephone Network was the name given to the overall network created by telephone companies.

Between the 1950s and the 1990s these analogue systems were replaced by digital networks and telephone exchanges which made use of high-speed leased lines (known as T1 lines) and modern digital computer technology in the telephone exchanges, and digital signaling protocols such as ISDN between exchanges. However, these newer systems still relied on the circuit switch concept for end-to-end connection so for the consumer, things remained analogue since, by and large, the connection between the local exchange and the household remained a simple copper wire.

In the 1990s, with the Internet and Web boom, telephone equipment manufacturers and telecoms companies also began to make increasing use of the idea of transmitting digital information between exchanges through IP-based packets. This was in part driven by the lower costs associated with transmitting voice calls in this manner, as bandwidth use is more efficient. From the mid-1990s onwards, telephone equipment manufacturers added IP capabilities to their existing PBX telephony switches and, more recently, software has been developed to enable users to plug a VoIP adaptor into their traditional telephone. In this way, VoIP calls can start and end on the PSTN, but are then routed, via a software gateway, over the Internet.

This history means that VoIP is operating in a heterogeneous environment that extends way beyond the Internet. Voice calls need to have the potential to be carried over a variety of different networks including local networks, PBXs, PSTN and the Internet. Advances in VoIP technology mean PC telephony software is available from many software developers. Gateway servers with voice-processing cards are also available, to act as an interface between the Internet and the PSTN, enabling users to make calls either from their PCs, or from an IP phone, into the traditional telephone networks. Calls can also be made using IP handsets, which look similar to traditional phones, but which are plugged into an IP-based network rather than into the traditional telephony network, and have more features and capabilities than traditional telephones. The result is that there are now a number of ways in which VoIP can be implemented:

· PC to PC. Both the caller and recipient use headsets plugged into their PC.

· PC to PSTN. Only the caller uses a headset. The recipient receives the call in the

traditional way.

· PSTN to PSTN. The caller uses an IP adaptor on their traditional telephone and

The call is received on a traditional phone. But the call travels over an IP network.

· IP phone to PSTN. The caller uses an IP phone, and the call transfers from the

IP network to the telephone network via a gateway.

· IP phone to IP phone. The call travels over an end-to-end IP network.

It should be noted that there is confusion amongst communications professionals and industry commentators as to the use of terms like “VoIP”, “Internet Telephony” and “IP Telephony’. In this report we shall use the term VoIP to refer to the set of technologies that allow voice to be transported over an IP infrastructure (in effect, an IP-enabled PSTN) and the term IP telephony (IPT) to refer to VoIP technologies that also incorporate and build on the more advanced functionality provided by the old PBX systems.

To make a VoIP call, the consumer user requires VoIP software and a broadband connection to the Internet. The software will handle the call routing to make sure the call reaches the intended destination as well as providing the codec. The software can be installed on a variety of hardware devices including traditional telephone handsets (using an adaptor that plugs into the telephone) or a PC or wireless device such as a Personal Digital Assistant (PDA). This use of software-enhanced end-user devices is one of the key distinguishing features of VoIP. Whereas the traditional telephone system contains its ‘intelligence’ within the network, VoIP makes use of the Internet model of intelligence at the edge of the network. This is often known as the end-to-end principle.

In order to make a call, an account with a VoIP service provider is also required. Different types of VoIP service are available, including services from traditional telephone carriers such as BT, and from specialized VoIP providers such as US firm Vonage and Luxembourg-based Skype. Some VoIP providers provide support only for PC-to-PC calls, while others provide the ability to make and receive calls from IP-enabled devices to users on the PSTN and on mobile networks.

To use VoIP, all you need is:

· High speed internet service (like cable or DSL)

· A credit card account w/ a US or Puerto Rico shipping address (no PO boxes)

· A touch-tone phone

Your connection needs a minimum upstream and downstream capacity of 90kb/s. If you’re not sure if you have this, you can contact your service provider to find out.

Of course, these are just the minimum requirements. Many customers benefit from having an expandable cordless phone system. This will allow you to place a phone is any room you desire without running wires, etc.