Quality of Service of Voice over Internet Protocol Essay

Quality of Service of Voice over Internet Protocol - Essay Example are providing opportunities to retailers in the industry to take on the traditional broadcasters and telecommunication companies. Companies like Cisco and Alcatel in close cooperation with ISPs like AT&T, Verizon and Comcast, took a lead in coming out with state of art internet telephony gadgets. The convergence of video, voice and data on next generation networks has resulted into integration of many services. As a result the all important digital pipe is stated to provide telephone service, television channels, radio channels, internet connections and data services all bundles in one connection. Theoretically such services can work wonders for an individual or a limited number of consumers. But as the number of online consumers increase substantially, the quality of digital services deteriorates. For example, mobile operators are already offering audio and video streaming services to their customers on 2.5G and 3G networks (Eastwood, 2007). But the problem starts when large numbers of people start using the digital pipe to communicate with each other or when millions of radio listeners hook on to the radio network to listen the weekly radio broadcast of President of America. This causes traffic congestion in the Internet line, thus severely affecting the quality of the service over the Internet Protocol. A debate has therefore started over the effectiveness of such technological advancements in replacing the traditional copper or fiber cables for telephony, terrestrial or cable television broadcasts or radio transmissions. This study is an effort towards analyzing the developments in information technology in general and telephony and communication technologies in particular. An effort would also be made to study how the perception of user has changed over the years towards accepting these changes and how smooth this transition has proved to be. As internet is gradually maturing and presenting a paradigm shift