VOIP, WI-FI TOUTED FOR DEVELOPING COUNTRIES AT ITU
GENEVA -- Several telecom regulators at the ITU Telecom World 2003 show here outlined plans for using Wi-Fi or voice- over-IP (VoIP) to provide voice and data in developing markets where phone connectivity lags. But several pointed to remaining challenges for VoIP in developing markets, particularly a lack of standards with how that technology interfaced with some switches, including older Signaling System-7 (SS-7). Afghanistan’s Minister of Communications Mohammad Masoom Stanekzai said that while VoIP was very cost effective, in some cases that equipment had signaling or integration conflict with switches that hadn’t been upgraded.
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VoIP and Wi-Fi technology have been touted repeatedly at the show as allowing markets without legacy voice infrastructure systems to move immediately to digital systems with cost-effective equipment and rapid time-to-market. Several experts cited examples in which new competitive carriers in freshly deregulated telecom markets were able to begin competing with incumbent carriers in less than 2 months by using IP-based systems. ITU Telecom Development Bureau Dir. Hamadoun Toure said earlier this week that his bureau was funding several new Wi-Fi projects in developing countries.
Thomas Evslin, chmn.-CEO of ITXC, which bills itself as the largest VoIP carrier in the world, said Bhutan had chosen a wireless access infrastructure for a communications system serving rural communities, using a combination of Wi-Fi and VoIP. The country, which is bordered by Tibet and India and has a 75% rural population, decided to use IP technology for its network backbone, all the way out to the edge, Evslin said. For the equivalent of the local loop, it chose an 802.11-based wireless system. “Why? Because equipment is really cheap and prices keep falling,” Evslin said. “When there is a particularly huge market for technology, it means low prices, which is particularly good for the developing world.” In the case of Bhutan, all applications, including voice, could be brought together on a single access network. It uses a satellite backbone to send a signal to local repeaters, with gateways to the public switched telephone network to change traffic to VoIP, he said. “It is an indicator of what the future will look like,” he said.
In Bolivia, ITXC worked with competitive carrier Cotas so that when that country deregulated its phone system, the company could use VoIP gateways over existing switches to obtain interconnection, as mandated by new rules opening the telecom market, Evslin said. After 60 days of deregulation, Cotas had gained a 36% market share, Evslin said. “What voice-over-IP allows is a fully meshed network,” he said.
Afghanistan’s Stanekzai said that a year and a half ago the country had no Internet infrastructure or terrestrial mobile communications. “Today we have moved in the right direction,” he said, having adopted a “technology neutral” policy for making decisions about new services, which he said entailed sorting through a “jungle of technologies.” But he said that developing countries faced challenges with new technologies, including: (1) A need for network integration and for “knowledge transfer,” so that local planners could be kept up to date on new technology developments. “We need far more collaboration and support from vendors… to help developing countries with the transfer of knowledge.” (2) A need for businesses to look at universal service as an opportunity, a theme that ITU Secy.-Gen. Yoshio Utsumi sounded in his opening address on Sat. In the case of technical challenges involving VoIP in developing countries, Stanekzai said that problems typically involve equipment coming from standalone vendors or the black market, making obtaining spare parts or technical support after installation extremely difficult.
VocalTec Chmn.-CEO Elon Ganor said he agreed that a lack of standards involving older SS-7 switches and new VoIP equipment was a challenge. “New technologies always have a tendency to offer paradise, but always in the future, never for now,” he said. VocalTec has been working on 50 or 60 different SS-7-based systems, he said. “It’s quite different from one version to another,” he said. “It can be quite difficult to get everything working. It always does. But the fact is that, SS-7 is supposed to be a standard, it is not,” he said. Ganor likened the situation to ISDN technology, for which he said he had needed a different card to connect in the U.S. compared with other countries, such as Germany.
There is an ITU standard for VoIP called H.323 that is adhered to by VocalTec and Cisco and is in the process of being updated, Ganor said. But Cisco and VocalTec have a combined 60% market share, meaning that because other vendors aren’t complying with that standard, “no vendor is interoperable with any other vendor,” he said. “The concern that the minister raises is a very real one,” he said of Stanekzai’s comments. “Every service provider who is in the audience should look very closely at who he is working with and what he is going to get.”