Developing standards for better VoIP services

Stuart Corner
Sunday, 17 June 2007 13:52

Business IT - Technology

The VoIP QoS project originated from suggestions presented at a VoIP Forum in Sydney at the end of 2005 organised by CA's' predecessor, the Australian Communications Industry Forum.

The proposal came from Shara Evans, then managing director of Telsyte. As a result of the positive response to that suggestion, ACIF commissioned Evans to produce a discussion paper on the issues surrounding such a proposal. Submissions to the discussion paper closed in June 2006 with about a dozen submissions received.

The ACMA was broadly supportive saying: "End-to-end QoS is desirable industry-wide to properly deliver differentiated services to consumers. This is of particular importance for VoIP services marketed as a substitute for a traditional PSTN service.

Optus felt that the work should be best left to the international standards bodies "Optus' view is that the issue of a QoS Standard for VoIP-to-VoIP calls is best left to international standards making bodies like IETF, ITV-T, ETSI & IEEE for resolution."

Telstra, not surprisingly was even more strongly opposed. Any standard developed and implemented would reduce its role to being one of a provider of bit-pipes. It saw "a somewhat different technology evolution path for voice communications than the discussion paper suggests." Telstra's view was that carriers such as it would be primarily responsible for end-to-end QoS for VoIP.

VoIP feature