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Emerging Issues

The telecommunication and Internet sectors are converging, but there remain some fundamental differences between the two network cultures.

Telecommunications is a much more controlled and regulated environment (sometimes referred to as "stateful") in which provisions are made for charging of calls and ensuring a minimum acceptable level of voice quality.

The Internet on the other hand is "stateless", a much less controlled environment that has been described by some as being more like the "Wild West". This is one reason why it is highly attractive to many providers of content.

Telecommunication players are switching to using Internet Protocol (IP) for the following reasons:

• the Internet is available anywhere and everywhere
• the Internet can support a variety of services e.g. voice, data, image
• the Internet provides economies of scale, with low costs from high volumes.
• IP is already used by millions of Internet users
• the telecom players want to move into the Web market
• the telecom sector could compete with an Internet type service
• many telecoms players are already working in partnerships with Internet companies, e.g. Sprint and Cisco, Lucent and Ascend.

The quality of voice telephone calls over the Internet and other IP networks still falls well short of the quality expected on ordinary telephone services, though this is expected to improve in the future.