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P2P – A boon for VoIP Service Providers
In one of the previous articles I described the benefits of P2P VoIP in very general terms. In this article I will focus on something more interesting and pertinent for service providers. By a VoIP service provider, I mean a provider with an offering such as that from Vonage, SunRocket (News - Alert) or Lingo, providing IP telephony over a broadband network to consumers and businesses. All of these networks today are built using a client/server approach. Calls involve looking up a centralized server, user authentication and final termination to another node in the same network or different network.
After doing a bit of research on pains and issues faced by these providers today on various blogs, forums and news topics I found the following interesting statistics: (a) Most of these networks have outages at least once a month involving different parts of their network. The reasons for these outages are primarily related to servers and range from instability of the servers, doing upgrades or high call load (b) In cases where the service is not tied to the broadband, there are complaints from customers about preferential treatment (equate this to low quality or an outage for specific customers) by the broadband service provider. While all this is hard to prove there are enough reports that this actually is happening (c) The service providers spend considerable time and resources on the testing, monitoring and reliability issues associated with the servers in their network. The deployment costs become quite high. When you add up all the extra routers, switches and redundancy required to build a network, this can become a source of constant problems. To top all of this, the network is no longer a source of competitive advantage anymore. Fortunately P2P VoIP provides a proven way to address these issues and create a strong competitive advantage for the provider without any need to overhaul or tear out the existing network.
P2P essentially de-centralizes an application. For example, in the case of file or media download, it allows the downloader to obtain the file from multiple users in the network. The files are stored on the user devices themselves, thereby avoiding the need for a separate network. When applied to VoIP, the location information of users in the network is distributed amongst users themselves, thereby avoiding the need for a specialized server to do the routing. When a user is not available, the requests can be handled in a traditional manner. Even applications like Voicemail can be implemented in the P2P network itself. All this can be built in a phased manner. Network upgrades are easy in P2P as they involve upgrade of software on user devices which does not involve disrupting service on a large scale.
It is widely understood that Client/Server protocols are easy to detect, monitor and sometimes block compared to P2P protocols which interestingly have a very tarnished image because of the same reason. In fact detection of P2P traffic is still a popular academic topic and unlike Client/Server, detection strategies tend to be different for each P2P protocol. P2P is also known for its “stealth” properties. It is much easier to upgrade and change protocol characteristics and behavior to keep on avoiding detection from intermediate devices. Management of P2P VoIP traffic is most easily done by the VoIP provider itself and proves to be a hard problem for an intermediary (like a broadband service provider). In fact to manage P2P VoIP traffic the broadband provider will need to develop a tight partnership with the VoIP provider.
Another piece of good news is that there is less need for infrastructure switches, routers, backup lines, redundant power etc since the network is now run by users themselves. The VoIP provider simply routes calls coming in or going out of the P2P network to other networks or when applications like group conferencing, IVR, Voicemail are required and not implemented in the P2P network.
Medhavi Bhatia is the CTO and co-founder of 3CLogic (www.3clogic.com), a Rockville, MD based startup which provides real-time P2P enabled applications for enterprises and large networks.
Voice over IP (VoIP) | X | | A real-time communications system that converts voice into digital packets containing media and signaling data that travel over networks using Internet Protocol....more |
Internet Protocol (IP) | X | | IP stands for Internet Protocol, a data-networking protocol developed throughout the 1980s. It is the established standard protocol for transmitting and receiving data
in packets over the Internet. I...more |
Interactive Voice Response (IVR) | X | | A hardware- or software-based computer system that enables incoming callers to interact with voice prompts or verbal commands....more |
Routing | X | | There are many often too many explanation of routing. Here’s one:
Hop-by-Hop Routing - IP Routing
- Distributes routing to routers
- Networks look/act like trees
- Data can traverse many routers ...more |
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