Voice Over IP

THE NEXT STEP

VoIP is proving to be effective in private enterprises. While the technology is still in its infancy, as it grows, it will require rethinking the traditional role of channel banks, PBXs, key systems, data service units (DSUs) and even Centrex. As you are reading this paragraph, several Internet task forces are developing standards that provide the interworking of the traditional telco technology with the IP platform, and vendors are already writing the code and building the hardware for these systems. A general view of these systems is provided in Figure 1-5, and they are described in more detail in later chapters.

The key components to this operation are the VoIP Gateway and the VoIP Call Agent, also called a Gatekeeper. We use ...