Feature

VoIP: Promises and threats

VoIP is finding favour across the board in corporate circles. At the same time it is plagued by security threats and regulatory hurdles. By Faiz Askari

Deployments undertaken in 2006 reveal that the Indian IP telephony enterprise equipment market is finally emerging from the mire of government-enforced restrictions.

During the past year, issues such as, Quality of Service (QoS), voice latency and reliability plagued this technology. However, there has been significant improvement. For a large enterprise, VoIP is the cheapest mechanism for long distance communication.

"Today the government allows a single PABX, which is logically partitioned, instead of having separate PABX phones for internal and external use. Connecting the IP world to Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) is still not allowed." - Dhananjay Ganjoo Vice President Enterprise Solutions Nortel India

Dhananjay Ganjoo, Vice President, Enterprise Solutions, Nortel India, says, “Today the government allows a single PABX, which is logically partitioned, instead of having separate PABX phones for internal and external use. However, connecting the IP world to Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) is still not allowed, limiting the growth of VoIP.”

Market potential

A study conducted by IDC revealed that sales of IP telephony solutions would overtake that of traditional equipment in the Asia Pacific region in 2007. Over 50 percent of telephony revnues will be accounted for by IP in countries such as India, Philippines and Indonesia in 2007.

By 2010, China and India are expected to overtake Australia’s IP telephony market by 64 percent and 15 percent respectively, as the most important markets for IP telephony equipment in the Asia-Pacific. Worldwide the VoIP market is growing at a CAGR of 278 percent. The current size of the IP telephony market in India is said to be in the range of $60 to $70 million.

With the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) focusing upon this area, punters expect this market to grow at a CAGR of 25 percent to top $250 million in 2011.

DoT has given permission to 121 ISPs to offer PC-to-phone services as of March 2005. The list includes companies like the Bharti, BSNL, Mahanagar Telephone Nigam Limited, Primus Telecommunication India Ltd, Sify Ltd, VSNL, Bharti Infotel Ltd, Vebtel Obconic Internet Protocol Pvt Ltd and Tata Teleservices among others. With its recent acquisition of Teleglobe, VSNL plans to invest in VoIP in a big way. Apart from VSNL, Bharti is also offering corporate VoIP services.

The state of VoIP

Minhaj Zia, Business Development Manager, Cisco, India & SAARC says, “The evolution of IP telephony in India began with organisations establishing Closed User Group (CUG) voice links between their head and branch offices. Companies from the services industry—banking, courier and IT services— have adopted CUG-based VoIP. Also the recent notification by DoT has further allowed organisations to leverage the power of IP Telephony by deploying IP PBX for their internal and external communication requirements.”

"Due to the limits imposed on VoIP, progress has been modest." Kothandaraman Karunagaran Assistant Vice President Computer Sciences Corporation India Pvt Ltd

Kothandaraman Karunagaran, Assistant Vice President, Computer Sciences Corporation India Pvt Ltd, informs, “Due to the limits imposed on VoIP, progress has been modest.” The present volume of Internet Telephony (a related technology) calls is between 200 and 300 million minutes annually. This traffic is shared by 51 ISPs that are offering PC-to-phone services.

Dinesh Sehgal, National Marketing Manager, Convergence Solutions, says, “The cost of IP telephony is drastically coming down. The cost difference between IP telephones and conventional telephones has reduced to 10 percent.”

It’s an IP PBX

Most of the PBX available today in India are IP ready and many organisations are going in for an IP PBX instead of a traditional one. IDC expects that by the end of 2006, a quarter of PBX lines that ship will be IP ones as compared to about 15 percent being shipped at present.

This technology is likely to become a standard during the next two to three years. Indian companies are in the process of replacing traditional communications equipment with IP gear.

The reason for VoIP

"The cost of IP telephony is drastically coming down. The cost difference between IP telephones and conventional telephones has reduced to 10 percent" - Dinesh Sehgal National Marketing Manager Convergence Solutions Avaya

VoIP will drive down the long distance costs considerably and benefit business process integration. Enterprises should evaluate their long-term strategy towards developing IP telephony applications and look beyond basic telephony requirements.

In today’s geographically dispersed work environment, IP telephony’s support for collaboration will help it become a mission-critical, strategic technology. The simplicity of the solution, advanced features that are available on IP phones and the advantages of using a converged infrastructure for data and voice all contribute to making VoIP attractive.

"The VoIP number in most cases is simpler than the regular phone, for instance a person maybe reachable on his extension for all his colleagues across the world" - Ajay Kumar Country Manager India Aventail Corporation

Ajay Kumar, Country Manager, India, Aventail, further elaborates, “Large companies that are geographically spread would invest in VoIP to enable their employees to interact with each other. The VoIP number in most cases is simpler than the regular phone, for instance a person maybe reachable on his extension for all his colleagues across the world. This is not only cost effective but the technology makes it easy for employees to interact. Companies are demanding that remote access solutions support VoIP.”

Dinesh Sehgal, National Marketing Manager, Convergence Solutions, Avaya says, “I believe that the cost of this technology is coming down, which leads organisations to start thinking about it.”

Regulations that choke

The biggest bugbear for those companies that do want to deploy IP telephony are the regulatory restrictions imposed by the Indian government and interoperability issues that have resulted in the lack of standardisation.

Till recently, a single infrastructure was not permitted in India. However, with TRAI notifying its approval for logical partitioning of PSTN and CUG networks, enterprises, service providers, application software developers as well as Internet telephony vendors have reason to rejoice.

Now corporate users can slash the investment that goes into setting up IP telephony. Due to lack of standardisation interoperability is a major concern. But with the adoption of a standard protocol such as Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) in the Call Control Engine organisations can integrate their legacy and IP systems.

As per the April 19th 2006 DoT circular, one can use any PBX to terminate IP and PSTN connections, provided that the specific PBX/IP PBX in question has the facility to partition and separate IP from the PSTN voice traffic. However, this new regulation only allows calls from CUG to CUG and PSTN to PSTN, but not between CUG and PSTN. The industry is still waiting for this restriction to be removed.

Security threats loom large

Security is an important factor in deploying IP telephony, whether you are deploying a native IP solution or a hybrid one. Given the risks, it is imperative that a corporation conducts a thorough evaluation of its security infrastructure before deploying an IP telephony solution. Zia says, “The impact of threats on the growing market can be curtailed if organisations follow security practices. The design and implementation of an IP telephony solution may even serve to improve security levels by renewing interest in an organisation’s security policies.”

Service theft is exemplified by phreaking, wherein a service is stolen from a service provider, or used while the cost is passed on to another person. Through eavesdropping, a third party can obtain names, password and phone numbers, allowing them to gain control over voicemail, calling plan, call forwarding and billing information. This subsequently leads to service theft. VoIP utilisation involving soft phones and software is always vulnerable to worms, viruses and malware.

In a VoIP network, Denial of Service (DoS) attacks can flood a target with unnecessary SIP call-signalling messages, thereby degrading the quality of service. This causes calls to drop prematurely and halts call processing. Once the target is denied the service and ceases operating, the attacker can remote control the administrative facilities of the system.

Spamming over Internet Telephony (SPIT) is also a threat as every VoIP account has an associated IP address and it is easy for spammers to send their messages (voicemails) to thousands of IP addresses. Voicemail boxes will be clogged and more space as well as better voicemail management tools will be required.

Moreover, spam may contain viruses and spyware. Call tampering is also proving to be a threat to the VoIP network. An attacker can spoil the quality of a call by injecting noise packets in the communication stream. VoIP is also particularly vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks, in which the attacker intercepts call-signalling SIP message traffic and masquerades as the calling party to the called party or vice versa.