Letters to the Editor
Cable & Wireless: VoiceOver IP to be encouraged in Britain
Dear Sirs:
In case you have not already seen it, Ithought you might be interested in this recent article submittedabout Cable and Wireless. Isn't it intriguing that the same companythat is trying to block Voice Over IP in the Cayman Islands istalking out of the other side of its mouth at the corporate level,making a global commitment to VOIP and planning to spend millions(from its cash reserves) to deploy the technology?
Thanks for your excellent coverage to date on the subject of Cableand Wireless.
M. Bailey
Reproduced from a recent press release...
LONDON, May 10 - Cable & Wireless PLCaims to switch all its corporate customers to voice over IP, ratherthan through the conventional circuit switched network, "withinthree years", according to chief executive Graham Wallace.
"I think that within three years, all our business customers'voice traffic will be carried over IP," he told a conferencecall to discuss the rollout of Cable & Wireless's 3.5 blnstg global IP network.
"That will provide a phenomenal unit cost saving for customers.We are the only carrier of this significance putting all our betsinto IP."
By that time, the technology should be in place to link the legacyvoice networks successfully to an IP network through a seriesof gateways and still meet quality of service (QoS) guarantees,he said.
Voice over IP has yet to take off among business customers despitean increasing number of carriers, like ITXC, specialising in thefield.
Analysts say this is mainly because the quality and reliabilityof turning voice into a series of packets of data and squirtingthem across an internet-style IP network is nowhere near goodenough to substitute for traditional circuit switching.
Prevailing industry opinion suggests that QoS is one of the mostsignificant issues for customers and carriers thoroughly dissatisfiedwith relying on the public internet or with sending traffic throughmultiple networks, with the risk of delays and lost packets ateach network boundary.
But Wallace insisted that the end-to-end IP network amountingto 2.5 petabytes of total capacity and speeds of 10 gigabits persecond would be able to satisfy stringent QoS terms of 100 pctavailability and 70 millisecond latency for customers in Europeand Japan as well as the U.S., Wallace said.
When it was complete in 2002, he said, C&W's would be theonly network which allowed traffic reliably to flow worldwidewithout peering, or switching from one carrier's network to theother.
The network -- built on capacity acquired as a result of WorldCom'stakeover of MCI in 1998 -- is to have 83 nodes in all.
Further buildout in the next two years will not require any fundraising,Wallace said, coming entirely from C&W's own cash reserves,although he would not give details ahead of next week's results.