January 03, 2004

What product is needed for the consumer market?

Two kinds of VoIP products are marketed for consumers – stand alone terminals like Grandstream BudgeTone-100 and Analog Telephone Adapters like SIPURA SPA-2000. Based on the feedback given in public discussion groups, they are great first generation products. They are inexpensive and have great voice quality. Still they are deficient in a number of ways.

The most critical of them is its inability to traverse the NAT provided by home routers; this requires special handling at a service provider through Session Border Controllers. The solution is very simple if these devices and the routers use UPnP.

The second deficiency is that they seem to assume the consumers will be interested in abandoning access to PSTN networks. I am of the opinion that consumers will prefer to access all the networks that are available to them. In the recent FCC VoIP forum, James Crowe of Level3 remarked that one network can not be the strongest, but interconnected network is our strength. This means, that what is needed is an ATA that provides not only an Ethernet interface, but also Tip and Ring interface and a cell phone interface a la CellSocket, Incidentally, a multinetwork device like this will address the lifeline issues like E911 and power failure.

Posted by aswath at January 3, 2004 12:51 AM
Related Posts Widget for Blogs by LinkWithin
If you do not have an OpenID, then please use www.enthinnai.com/unauopenid/anyblog.

 

Comments



Copyright © 2003-2014 Moca Educational Products.