On Tue, 11 Feb 2003, John Todd wrote: (snip)
Now, back to the NANOG-ish content: I know a fundamental change in technology when I see it, and VOIP is an obvious winner. VOIP has been smoldering for a few years, and the sudden growth of various easy-to-implement SIP proxies and service platforms, plus the sudden drop in price of SIP hard-phones, is going to push growth tremendously. Currently, the underlying technology is UDP that moves calls around. This is all well and good until you get thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of calls going at once. QoS is, as Bill says, not a problem right now on public networks; I've used VOIP across at least three exchange or peering sessions (in each direction, no less!) and suffered no quality loss, even at 80kbps rates. However, when a significant percentage of cable and DSL customers across the country figure this technology out, does this cause problems for those providers? Is it worthwhile for large end-user aggregators to start figuring out how they are going to offer this service locally on their own networks in order to save on transit traffic to other peers/providers? Or is this merely a tiny bump in traffic, not worth worrying about?
More interestingly: what happens to the network when the first "shared" LD software comes into creation? Imagine 1/3 (to pick a worst-case percentage) of your customers producing and consuming (possibly) 80kbps of traffic for 5 hours a day as they offer their local analog lines to anyone who wants to make local calls to that calling area.
Overseas calling I expect will show similar growth. Nobody wants to pay $.20 or even $.10 per minute to Asian nations, so as soon as Joe User figures out how this VOIP stuff works, there will be (is?) a tendency for UDP increases on inter-continental spans. Nothing new here; we've all said this was coming for years. Now it's finally possible - is everyone ready?
JT
(snip) VOIP is likely to cause a financial upheaval in the telecom industry, because the overwhelming fraction of revenues still comes from voice services. However, VOIP is likely to have only a minor impact on Internet backbones. The reason is that there simply isn't that much voice traffic. Various estimates (such as those in my papers at <http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~odlyzko/doc/networks.html>) say that already there is about twice as much US Internet backbone traffic as US long distance voice traffic, and that is if you count voice as two 64 Kb/s streams of data. If you use compression, that goes down even further. Now introducing flat rate VOIP service will stimulate voice usage some, but based on various previous experiences, not by enough to make a quantum difference, especially since (again, based on previous experiences) it will take a while for VOIP to spread widely. Andrew Odlyzko