Abstract :
Internet and IP telephony is rapidly capturing mindshare across the telecommunications world. Every major US telephone company and many cable TV companies are already offering services, or at least experimenting with them, and the number of independent service providers who aren´t associated with ISPs continues to grow. Most of the Fortune 500 enterprises are considering enterprise-level deployment of IP telephony, driven, at least in part, by the fact that almost no research or development work is being done on non-IP-based telephony. Equipment vendors have overwhelmingly bet their R&D dollars on the IP telephony horse.
