Mainland telecoms firms set VoIP pace

As competition heats up in China's telecommunications sector, the country will continue to make unprecedented Internet-based telephony developments that the rest of the world will follow in the next few years, senior Cisco Systems officials say.

China United Telecommunications (China Unicom), the mainland's second-largest communications carrier, was expected to remain the world's biggest VoIP (voice over Internet protocol) network operator - measured by size, capacity, traffic and number of cities - reached by its service.

'The deployment of Internet-based networking technologies is expanding rapidly nationwide and will help China compete in the global marketplace as part of the World Trade Organisation,' said Wang Cheng-kun, solutions architect for Cisco Asia-Pacific's voice technology group.

He said Cisco was involved in testing next-generation Internet telephony equipment and services on the mainland with the main network operators and large enterprises.

Cisco is supplying key networking equipment for China Unicom's US$40 million VoIP network expansion programme, which started in July. This expansion will extend the China Unicom network to more than 321 cities, across 30 provinces on the mainland, using Cisco gear for backbone networks and the H.323 standard for voice control.

Paul Jones, systems architect for Cisco's packet telephony division, said: 'This project has already set the precedent in terms of the size of a carrier's VoIP operation and its use of H.323-standard equipment.'

In Internet telephony terms, VoIP is a set of facilities used to send voice information in digital form through discrete packets rather than in the traditional circuit-committed protocols of the public switched telephone network. An advantage of VoIP is it avoids the tolls charged by ordinary telephone services. The H.323 standard is the networking industry-recognised technology for sending voice and video using the Internet and intranet.