The Hindu : Voice Internet will be the winner

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Tuesday, Dec 10, 2002

Business

Business

Voice Internet will be the winner

By Anand Parthasarathy

BANGALORE DEC. 9. With upcoming Voice Quality Enhancement Systems that reduce noise and cancel out echoes, telephony harnessing the Internet Protocol (IP) will soon be indistinguishable — and rapidly superior — to current land-based systems based on analogue technology. Already in many countries — particularly in the Far East, the customer does not know it, over half of all international calls are effected using the Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP).

Speaking here today at a seminar on "Innovative solutions for tomorrow's networks,'' R. Brough Turner, Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer of the U.S.-based NMS Communications, felt the third major crossover in the telecom scenario from current Time Division Multiplexing (TDM) — the technology that drives the world's fixed telephone systems — to the Internet-based alternative would occur within seven to eight years. Some time in 2000-01, an earlier crossover had taken place when data overtook global voice traffic; and in May this year, a second changeover had occurred when the number of mobile phones in use worldwide (about 1.2 billion) exceeded the number of land phones. NMS which co-sponsored the seminar with the India-based embedded systems specialist, Mistral, unveiled "HearSay'' — claimed to be the first ever "open system'' for the wireless arena — a product that enabled a seamless fusion of mobile telephony with the Internet through speech modes. Supporting technologies such as speech recognition, text-to-speech conversion and a voice-based variant of the mobile Net standard XML, it enabled the user to access web resources by speaking rather than punching keys and getting responses in multiple modes (voice, text, graphics). With VoIP legalised in India, the explosion of Voice-Internet applications would occur here too, Mr. Turner felt.

He also suggested that total multimedia access via mobile phone was a milestone down the same road, albeit a few years away. Anees Ahmed, President of Mistral, told The Hindu that the company would be working closely with NMS to deliver complete solutions in this frontline technology area of VOIP-driven applications for the Indian and global market.

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