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What is Internet Telephony Good For?
The most significant benefit of IPT and driver of its evolution is money-saving and easy implementation of innovative services:
* In the future, Internet Telephony Service Providers (ITSP) may use a single infrastructure for providing both, Internet access and Internet telephony. Only data-oriented switches could be deployed for switching data as well as packetized voice. Multiplexing data and voice could also result in better bandwidth utilization than in today's over-engineered voice-or-nothing links. Not only the providers, but also their clients will profit of lower costs eventually.
* Now, customers may take advantage of flat Internet rating vs. hierarchical PSTN rating and save money while letting their long-distance calls be routed over Internet. This is especially true in Europe, where the prices of long-distance calls are still higher than in US. But: according to some estimations, the prices of the traditional and the Internet telephony will equalize together with the convergence of quality of services provided by them.
* The IPT users may also profit of its software-oriented nature: software solutions may be easily extended and integrated with other services and applications, e.g. whiteboarding, electronic calendar, or
WWW. Deployment of new IP telephony services requires significantly lower investment in terms of time and money than in the traditional PSTN environment.
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