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A white paper entitled “Broadband Services, Applications, and Networks: Enabling Technologies and Business Models,” presented by the International Engineering Consortium in 2004 but still widely circulated by Stealth Communications (News - Alert) today, touches on the past and present methods of voice communications and where the new world of VoIP is heading. While written over seven years ago, Stealth Communications – committed to providing network platforms interconnection and voice peering – still displays the white paper prominently on its homepage.

In addition to covering the phenomenon of voice peering, the paper covers another point well, the overview of VoIP itself. Since the transition of voice calls from analog waves to digits, the paper argues that “voice became a data application.”

Not that quality always followed in its train; those of us who have used VoIP telephony have noticed the problems associated with packet lag time, problems unknown in analog. The problems were worse in 2004. But so was the excitement. (This reporter remembers well sitting in a cafe along the Turkish Mediterranean coast about that time, listening to a Dutch entrepreneur speaking excitedly about something called “Skype (News - Alert),” which although he didn’t fully understand how, made long-distance calls “very much less costly.”)

“Local and long-distance voice carriers upgraded their equipment to carry digital voice service to improve quality, and their margins as data can be statistically multiplexed, or in other words, they could create more time in the same space and make more money,” the paper noted, adding that “this is also referred to as compression and correlates to fitting 20 pounds of something into a 10-pound bag and getting paid for the 20 at the 10-pound cost.”

The economics, of course, were unarguable back in 2004 and remain so today: “What had been reserved for the largest of traditional voice carriers has become available to the smallest and most aggressive of providers.”

The paper hit on another key reason for the growth of VoIP over the past seven years, that overall “the efficiencies outweigh the inefficiencies at this point.”

The paper did admit, however, that there was still quite a ways to go solving the remaining problems. Today, many of those have been solved, which is why VoIP has achieved the popular success it has. Nevertheless, “regardless of the issues, this development was clearly for the good of the many and not of the few.”

Indeed it was, and the paper did a good job explaining the role of gateways, not widely understood by the general public at the time or among the public who use VoIP telephony nowadays.

“VoIP gateways are what enable voice over the public Internet or a private IP network,” the paper said, explaining that gateways are essentially a combination of a traditional voice switch and an IP router, and that the ones connecting to the public Internet are predominantly located at core interconnection facilities and not IP peering points, “due to their need to interconnect to the legacy TDM voice networks for full coverage.”

The paper covered other such topics in equally well-executed summary form, such as metro and long-haul Ethernet transport, IP peering and marketplace transparency, among others.

In other voice peering news, as carriers shift their traditional phone networks to all-IP communications networks they are capitalizing on new IP-based technologies that help them route calls more efficiently and cost effectively and at the center of this is voice peering fabric. By interconnecting their IP-based voice networks, carriers and service providers have created, in essence, an "Internet for Voice" that allows them to terminate calls anywhere in the world, using each other's networks.