VoIP and convergence in 2008 will see VoIP over 3G wireless and more

<<<...9. After its big 2007 unified communications launch targeted to the large enterprise, Microsoft will put its marketing muscle behind an effort to bring unified communications to the mid-tier business market. Other smaller UC suppliers targeting the same market will benefit from Microsoft’s activity.

10. The upcoming FCC spectrum auction will prove an interesting opportunity for companies like Google to offer new services over a mobile network, but complications with the auction will prevent new spectrum from becoming an available resource for new services before the end of the decade.

Effective VoIP management; echo cancellation in VoIP systems

Today, we'd like to recommend two articles for our readers. The first, authored by Jim Metzler, vice president of Ashton, Metzler & Associates, and co-author of Network World's Wide Area Networking newsletter, is a Kubernan Brief title "Effective VoIP Management". Jim points out that when run over a packet network, voice does not always perform as well as it does when run on a circuit-switched network and that user frustration with VoIP issues can have a major impact on how the rest of the company views the IT organization. The second paper, titled "Addressing Echo in VoIP Systems: Understanding and Monitoring Echo Cancellation for Optimal VoIP Performance" was written by NetQoS and addresses the non-trivial implications of echo. In the first article, Jim notes that because of the sensitivity of voice to a range of network parameters, adding bandwidth is even less likely to guarantee acceptable VoIP quality than it is to guarantee the successful performance of other key applications. As a result, IT organizations need an application performance management solution that will specifically monitor voice performance. Jim takes a look at VoIP characteristics, network design, and how to manage VoIP effectively. Read the latest WhitePaper - The High-Availability Business: How a Simpler Network Can Meet the Demands of Business-Critical Applications In the second paper, NetQoS delves into the details about echo in a VoIP system, and points out that even though VoIP does not create echo, due to the temporal aspect of echo, VoIP systems can and do increase the amount of echo heard during a telephone conversation. It discusses echo cancellation as one of the more complex parameters that need tuning to preserve VoIP call quality and concludes that IP networking specialists are increasingly finding that they must understand and monitor echo cancellation to manage their VoIP system.