Carriers are examining different strategies to staff to meet the needs of an IP transition. Some carriers will be able to leverage existing in-house expertise at the data layer, while others will look outside the organization to hire a few key players to lead the transition. Some carrierswill turn toward third-party providers for access to transition expertise.

However, in every model, close collaboration will multiply the effectiveness of your staff. The people in place need to be in a position to work together, not in segregated silos, to understand and develop the new skill sets they need. Cross-training between voice and data network teams, for instance, can lead to VoIP experts, who can in turn evangelize entire teams.

Even those organizations relying on third-party experts will need in-house staff knowledgeable enough to challenge assumptions around design decisions, network-based policies, or business processes in order to drive the best results.

There are a number of options now available to carriers as they make the transition into IP based networks, however it is up to each carrier to determine the models that meet their business objectives, their personnel core competencies as well as their internal system infrastructure goals in order to successfully plan and execute their transition intentions with the right staffing skills, experience and capabilities.

Although some forms of VoIP have been around since the Internet first started its explosive growth in the mid nineties, it has only started impacting traditional telephony traffic and revenue patterns over the last couple of years, driven by the availability of always-on broadband Internet connections and the popularity of bundled internet, telephone and television services sold as flat rate “triple play” packages by DSL and cable providers.

It’s important to keep in mind that voice over IP services fall into several categories. In some cases, VoIP services simply use the Internet as an inexpensive replacement for longhaul TDM networks. Others, including corporate services using digital PBXes and IP phones, involve private networks. Another incarnation, often referred to as IPT (IP Telephony) implies peer-to-peer Internet connectivity, as exemplified by Skype.

Quantification of the VoIP phenomenon is rather difficult as IP is often obscured in the middle of an end-to-end call or within a private network. Better data exists for Internet Telephony – Point Topic estimates that at the end of June 2008 there were 77.2 million IPT subscribers worldwide up from 66.8 million at the end of 2007.

Looking ahead to an IP future, what role will wholesale carriers play? VoIP peering and IP interconnects make it much faster and easier to interconnect, creating the possibility for direct interconnection to become one of the main model of exchange.

In the near term, this model seems quite unlikely to become dominant. Timeframes for transitioning to IP vary greatly among carriers, and managing conversion between IP and TDM will likely remain a challenge that many service providers will prefer to rely on wholesale carriers to resolve for the foreseeable future.

However, even if the world were fully IP, simplifying the interconnection process wouldn’t simplify the process of managing hundreds or even thousands of direct commercial relationships. For wholesale players like Tata Communications, who works with over 1500 carriers around the world, the ability to simplify this process will continue to be a valuable even in an all IP world.

For carriers, one of the most anticipated benefits of the transition to IP networks is a significant simplification of network architecture. Rather than managing multiple networks to support multiple applications, service providers can run the range of their services on a single IP network.

This convergence translates to cost efficiencies on management expenses and decreased time to market for new service rollouts, as development cycles no longer have to take into consideration the multiple networks touched.

However, so long as hybrid networks continue to be the norm, carriers will miss out on the main cost and development efficiencies promised by IP. Instead of touching only one network, services will continue to involve the management and integration of multiple protocols and technologies.

While a measured, phased transition to all-IP networks is a possible approach, the push for efficiencies presents a strong argument for moving full speed ahead to retire legacy protocols as quickly as possible.

IP is increasingly the universal protocol on top of which all geographically dispersed communications services are developed. If this seems extreme, consider the range situations in which IP is already used.

IP-based services range from reading RFID tags to web browsing, using a GPS- enabled smartphone to get directions from Google Earth or look up the closest sushi restaurant, download a song or learn the latest sports scores. IP is used by sensors and monitoring devices to communicate the pressure in different segments of a pipeline, or to detect earth tremors and alert people in the affected geographical area. IP is used to communicate with satellites and to receive images from the Mars Lander.

Today we are witnessing an accelerating transition to the “everything over IP” model; this obviously includes voice. Some prognosticators suggest that all major carriers will have completely migrated from the prevailing TDM architecture to a VoIP architecture within the next five years. Even mobile operators will move to an end-to-end, IP- based environment as the world moves to 4G and LTE.

We’ve started One IP World as a place for the industry to discuss the challenges and opportunities that will accompany the transition to IP, and look forward to your enthusiastic participation in our discussion.

The skill sets that your staffs are going to need now are not the same as those they will need during and after an IP transition. Your voice and network staffs have probably already thought through these issues, but what about your back office and systems integration teams? They will need to come up to speed on new devices & protocols, providing additional data fields and points of interconnect which will drive changes in techniques for retrieval, delivery & mediation, inducing updated architectures and modeling for existing system adjustments and possibly set in motion initiatives toward new system implementations.

In order to meet the expertise demand it is imperative that Organizations tap into the significant pool of IP voice experience available today, and proper recruiting can help bring in key transition leaders. In order to leverage these resources it will be critical to expand and conduct training and knowledge sharing to develop deep and long-term expertise in your team. Online training, boot camps, vendor-driven training and peer training are all good routes to explore to assist employees with the willingness and capability to learn to capture new skills.

Even individual employees can take meaningful, proactive steps to prepare for an IP transition. There is a wealth of online resources that can be leveraged, including whitepapers, research effort, standards bodies, books and simulations that are free or low cost, and each of these options can provide meaningful expertise that can be leveraged for future growth.