VoIP is changing the traditional telephony world. It challenges many assumptions, but will it also dramatically change interconnection?Telephony is important to people. There is no other technology that can bring us so quickly and directly in touch with over 5 billion subscribers in the world.Mobile telephony has more than 4 billion subscribers. The internet only 1.5 billion and VoIP a smaller proportion of that e.g. Skype has only 400 million registered users.However, Skype has 8% of all international voice calls and VoIP is embedded in every Instant Messaging client and every Xbox /Playstation.VoIP challenges the role of the telecommunications company. It shows that you don’t need a telephony service provider to talk and that talk can be (almost) free
Interconnection makes it possible to connect with people who are using different telephony service providers and/or different technologies.Will the way interconnection works also change dramatically because of the introduction of VoIP?VoIP can support all traditional interconnection processes, business models and regulation. Using ENUM for lookup would enable innovation.Interconnection functions the same regardless of technology. It consists of:
