One of the advantages frequently mentioned for IP-based voice networks is reducing timeframes to roll out new and innovative services. Tracing the source of this advantage goes all the way back to the differences in underlying architecture between IP and TDM networks.

IP networks adhere to the OSI Model to separate conceptually similar network functions into layers. Within a network, each layer may be controlled by separate software, hardware, locations, or even organizations.

By contrast, in the TDM world, leading equipment manufactures such as Nortel bundled the various functions involved in managing and controlling voice networks into big switches. To release a new feature, manufacturers had to consider the product cycle of an entire, complex, piece of equipment. Further, high upfront expenses to upgrade and replace switches slowed the pace of adoption on the carrier end.

By moving to IP, service providers can break each component down and situate it in the network, logically and physically. Each piece then scales and innovates on its own. Simpler product roadmaps, lower prices and more competition all lead to shorter timeframes between new releases, and lower barriers to adopt innovative new features.

A ‘decade from hell’, according to Times Magazine, a ‘dazing decade’ says Newsweek. In Copenhagen, at the Climate Change Conference, the World Meteorological Organization talked of the ‘hottest decade on record’. BusinessWeek characterized the decade as one of ‘innovation interrupted’. All this gloom made me wonder how to qualify our IPv6 decade? Most of Jordi Palet’s ten-year-old “IPv6: Status Around the World” could have been written last month, including quotes by our internet luminaries. A lost decade?

The early years were punctuated by the Tony Hain – Geoff Huston joust whether address exhaustion would be as soon as 2008 or as late as 2020 while others where dreaming of killer applications and associated riches. The burst of the internet and telecom bubbles dampened the early enthusiasm for a while as the internet wasn’t doubling every three months after all. It took some years to soak up the excess bandwidth. Research and Education networks like internet2 in the States and Canarie in Canada moved along pushing the IPv6 envelope becoming dual stack as early as 2002, but this did not propagate toward the edges. The problem was and still remains to a large degree that campuses and labs did not have immediate need or justification to follow. Some forward looking Tier-1 internet traffic carriers started to include IPv6 in their calls for tender as part of the regular upgrade cycle but here also IPv6 adoption did not propagate downward. The second half of the decade saw the internet continuing to grow more than 50% yearly and they got rewarded as their network cores became dual stack ready riding the coattails of the upgrade cycle. Fifty plus percent annual growth does not a lost decade make.

What was overlooked, like so often, is that progress depends on the confluence of advances on several technology fronts and on reaching critical masses of users. Parallel progress in broadband access deployment, in processing power and in storage combined with growing affordability catalyzed dematerialization of the distribution of news, libraries, music and video. Even shopping and even some face to face meetings were affected. Licking the wounds after the telecom bubble, the wisdom of “build and they will come” was, for a time, dubious. However, the logjams of bandwidth, processing power and storage bottlenecks broke with some synchronicity and the time had come for bandwidth gobblers like YouTube, Hulu and the Social Networking Commons to blossom. Google and Yahoo made these masses of information searchable by humans and cashed in on the advertising dollars flowing to the internet.

Telecom highlights of the last decade? The bubble, the world cutting the umbilical cord going mobile, prevalence of high speed internet access, the ascent of Google, the Apple iPhone.

The next decade? What about six hundred million FTTx subscribers, six billion humans with mobile communicating smart devices, sixty billion communicating ‘things’. IPv6 is prevalent by 2006 and we finally write about something else. Abundance of IP addresses pushes virtualization further; virtual servers live in virtual clouds which follow the sun and winds and circle the earth on an eternal quest for the most energy and cost efficient physical datacenters. The 5,000th exoplanet will be catalogued (415 are known today) and indisputable evidence for extraterrestrial life will be found.

No decade has ever been lost, evolution just does not progress in a linear fashion. Imagine if we had written a summary of the first decade of the century in late December 1909. The first ten years were extraordinary while the following ten would really become a ‘‘decade of hell’’ for tens of millions who happily celebrated New Year 1910. In retrospect our contemporary last decade was not that bad after all.

This post orginally appeared on CircleID.

Most carriers are now delivering multiple types of services and applications for customers, or if not now, have plans to do so shortly, and the vast majority of these services are being delivered over IP. Many of these services, such as IPTV or videoconferencing, have bandwidth needs that are much more intensive than that of voice, so that the IP transport networks are increasingly dwarfing TDM infrastructure.

Size has further advantages for the IP marketplace. The per-port cost for VoIP over TDM is already much lower, but unlike TDM equipment manufacturers, IP equipment providers are continuing to focus on decreasing the per-port costs of their solutions.

As equipment providers continue to innovate, the gap in per-port cost between IP and TDM will only increase, offering further incentives for carriers to hasten the transition to IP.

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.