Network management Toolkit

VoIP: The broadband bottleneck?

Ben Charny CNET News.com

Published: 07 Apr 2004 12:50 BST

Broadband Net-phoning services pushing aggressive expansion plans are discovering a harsh reality: some residential Internet service providers in the United States currently can't guarantee the bandwidth required to handle calls effectively.

AT&T vice president Kathy Martine said she learned that lesson the hard way during recent trials of the company's CallVantage Net-phoning plan, which it hopes to introduce in 100 markets this year. Some customers' broadband connections just weren't good enough to provide "AT&T-like" quality, she said. So the company was forced to help the broadband providers fix their connections.

Now AT&T Labs is "doing a lot of statistical modelling and analysis on that so we can, in fact, prove where the problems are in the future," Martine said recently. "But the reality is that it's only as good as the broadband connection to your home."

Analysts forecast that VoIP (voice over Internet Protocol) calls will eventually outstrip conventional calls, thanks to cost savings of up to 30 percent. Consumer demand has been encouraging, providers say, and VoIP plans have now been announced by all of the major carriers in the United States, as well as by their cable rivals.

Still, industry insiders worry that ongoing quality problems could hold back growth.

VoIP backers such as Cisco Systems insist that the industry has solved problems that once plagued the technology. But those claims tacitly assume the presence of high-quality broadband networks, something industry insiders admit they don't always encounter when deploying service in residential markets.

"We need to bring carrier-grade features to the customer," said Bernd Kuhlin, Siemens' president of enterprise networking.

Broadband's sporadic quality isn't the only problem. Another major one involves reaching 911 emergency services. For now, most VoIP services can't, although a coterie of emergency officials and VoIP leaders say they are close to a solution. VoIP service providers also don't allow connections between one another's customers. They remain "islands," while the complex business arrangements to "peer" (as it's called) are still being hashed out, according to Kuhlin.