Beyond VoIP Protocols: Understanding Voice Technology and Networking Techniques for IP Telephony

IP telephony, enabled by softswitches, is going to usher in a new telecom era. By putting voice and data over one IP network, operators can enjoy lower costs and create new, revenue-generating 'multimedia' services. What are the advantages of IP Telephony? New entrants to the communications service provider sector must provide data services as well as voice. VoIP dispenses with the need to build two separate networks. Offering a bundled package of services over one network means greater efficiency and higher margins. With broadband fixed and mobile access becoming more prevalent, service providers can offer a whole host of telephony, data and internet services down the one connection.

A companion volume to IP Telephony: Deploying VoIP Protocols, this book takes the reader a stage deeper into how to prepare the network and exploit the technology to its full potential. It first introduces the basics of speech coding and voice quality. The authors go on to demonstrate how quality of service may be built into the network and deal with network dimensioning aspects such as multipoint communications and how to model call seizures. A final section on multimedia encoding and transport techniques such as multicast make this book an ideal reference for engineers seeking to build communications networks for the future.

• Detailed and thorough reference on the theory of speech coding and voice quality and how that affects the services that can be provided.
• Covers quality of service issues and suggests appropriate solutions.
• Discusses network dimensioning, the challenges and the benefits.
• Demonstrates multimedia encoding and transport techniques.