It was while watching “The Perfect Storm” that Robert Bussabarger, network administrator for the city of Bend, Ore., became a true believer in Internet protocol-based telephony.
Bussabarger was watching the movie over a data network connection — while holding a videoconferencing session and fielding a phone call on that same fiber link.
The city wanted to demonstrate to local businesses how robust Internet protocol, or IP, networks could be. So Bussabarger put his own network through a perfect storm: a torrent of simultaneous voice, video and data transmissions from a nearby fire station. Even he was surprised at the results.
“We throttled it way up,” Bussabarger said. Still, the network switches kept pace. The movie didn’t skip frames, the videoconference didn’t jump, and the voices over the phone didn’t sound clipped or echoey.
“At that point I thought this is pretty damn solid. We didn’t have a hiccup, not even a glitch,” he said. And it all ran on IP.
Bend has found, just as other government agencies are finding, that the technologies for piggybacking phone service over data networks are robust enough for everyday use, at least in niche areas.
And with manufacturers such as Cisco Systems Inc., San Jose Calif., aggressively marketing IP-enabled telephony products, industry observers predict agencywide internal phone networks, called private branch exchanges, or PBXs, may be soon eliminated altogether in favor of “converged” data and voice networks. The converged networks will cost less, simplify infrastructures and enable new services.
These advantages are spurring a rapidly growing government market. The federal market for convergence solutions, which includes hardware, software and professional services, is expected to grow from $208.6 million in fiscal 2002 to $1.6 billion in 2009, according to research firm Federal Sources Inc., McLean, Va.
Yet the agencies and integrators building convergent networks will be beset with major challenges. Agencies must overcome turf wars and jiggle the voice and data budget lines; neither is an easy task in a bureaucratic environment. And integrators hoping to snare new convergence opportunities will encounter fierce competition from telecom carriers also seeking dominance in this combined market of IT support and access services.
“It’s not completely clear that the integrators will own the converged solution space,” said Warren Suss, head of telecommunications industry analyst firm Suss Consulting, Jenkintown, Pa.
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