Posts Tagged "voip"

Are Traditional Networking and Telecommunication Systems a Dying Breed?

Posted by yourlocaltechguy on Feb 23, 2011 in Articles | 0 comments

Devel­op­ments in wire­less technologies

The new mil­len­nium has soon proved itself to be one of even more rapid and often trau­matic change than ever before.  For pro­fes­sion­als who are part of the Infor­ma­tion Age this presents a par­tic­u­lar chal­lenge.  Sys­tems are needed that would not only serve the cur­rent needs of the client, but also the chang­ing tech­no­log­i­cal needs of vast com­pa­nies and cor­po­ra­tions.  VoIP sys­tems are equipped to pro­vide this kind of ser­vice. Three trends of an ever chang­ing busi­ness world:

• IP tele­phony
• Wire­less LANs
• Inter­net security

It appears that a more favor­able out­look has replaced the neg­a­tive views of net­work­ing and secu­rity issues dur­ing 2001 and 2002.  New devel­op­ments in sev­eral net­work­ing and wire­less tech­nolo­gies have brought about this more pos­i­tive paradigm.

VoIP con­fer­ence call sys­tems for exam­ple have the capa­bil­ity to use pass­word tech­nol­ogy as a secu­rity mea­sure against intrud­ers.  Fur­ther­more fire­wall prod­ucts have been inte­grated in terms of the abil­ity to open ports dynam­i­cally.  VoIP requires more than sta­tic port assign­ments, and of course secu­rity mea­sures must be suf­fi­cient to cover its dynamic nature.  In terms of secu­rity then, the devel­op­ments in the field appear to remain on track with new tech­nol­ogy.  In the future cen­tral­ized man­age­ment pol­icy may form part of secu­rity technology.

What is Voice over IP?

Posted by yourlocaltechguy on Feb 18, 2011 in Articles | 0 comments

Voice over Inter­net Pro­to­col, or VoIP, as it is also known, is a com­bi­na­tion of tele­phonic tech­nol­ogy with Inter­net appli­ca­tions.  This rapidly advanc­ing tech­nique is used in a num­ber of appli­ca­tions, includ­ing desk­top IP phones, mobile VoIP-enabled hand­held devices, and gate­ways. (Skype , Von­age etc) What is par­tic­u­larly remark­able about the growth of the voice over IP indus­try is the fact that the Inter­net was orig­i­nally designed for pur­poses not related to voice communications.

Indeed, voice com­mu­ni­ca­tions were han­dled effec­tively by pub­lic switched tele­phone net­works (PSTNs) and cel­lu­lar net­works.  The very nature of the Inter­net used as it was for asyn­chro­nous data com­mu­ni­ca­tion made it unfa­vor­able for the voice com­mu­ni­ca­tions indus­try.  Other fac­tors play­ing a role in this include the loss and retrans­mis­sion of data pack­ets and no spe­cific band­width ded­i­cated for each user.  Unlike tele­phonic net­works such as PSTNs and the cel­lu­lar indus­try, the Inter­net is not con­trolled by a sin­gle cen­tral­ized entity for coor­di­na­tion pur­poses.  Real-time com­mu­ni­ca­tion ser­vices pow­ered by the Inter­net should thus prove highly unlikely or at the very least challenging.