Newswise — There are about 1 billion fixed telephone lines and 2 billion cellphones in the world. Most calls still travel across traditional systems based on proprietary software and hardware. Soon, though, they will move to networks in accord with voice over Internet Protocol. It's occurring all over the world. Last winter, the chief technology officer at British Telecom said that over the next three to five years, BT would like to "turn off the public switched telephone network."
If that happened all over the world overnight, and all of these phones connected to the Internet instead, it would double or triple the number of objects joined by that network of networks, wreaking havoc with some parts of it. Folding traditional telephony into the Internet is tricky. Their hardware and software are different, and, perhaps hardest of all, today they involve totally different databases. The thing they do most differently involves all these differences. It is called signaling, that is, keeping track of all of the potential communicating parties, their equipment, and their services, and selecting the right combination for each contact. And so, even after we merge the telephone system with the Internet, we must strengthen that portion of the network that handles signaling across the entire world and the Internet, so it can stand up to the resulting load.
Done right, over the course of the next several years, the move will open doors to new telephone services that will make all our lives easier and better. Today we fumble through communications, calling people at their office, their home, their cellphone, uncertain whether to leave a message, sometimes wondering if a text message wouldn't be better, or e-mail, or instant messaging. In the ideal world of tomorrow, we will simply contact you , and let the network figure out how best to get to you.
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