Advantages of VoIP in the german research network

With the arising of telephony over the internet, loads of institutes start looking at that new technology. They ask themselves for sense and meaningful use. Many questions appeared to be answered first. The first one is about the interoperability of the end systems. It should be possible to change the vendor and implement the new devices without any problems into the existing VoIP infrastructure. These ideas led to first single VoIP labs. To increase the value of such installations, they should be interconnected. Because of the very heterogeneous hardware, which has been used by the institutes, the construction of a VoIP network has been a project for itself. Several working groups have been formed in order to examine single questions much closer. Examples are the accounting, the security and the required quality of service within the transport network. However, the research work has not finished yet. There are still unsolved questions about the accounting and the security in such a large VoIP network as it became today. Routing strategies have to be discussed as well as security questions. Maybe a single institution should start offering IP telephony as a service for the complete german research network. Currently, it is a distributed group. During the tests, VoIP has proved its position within the internet landscape as well as within the standard telephony. The participants of the VoIP project managed to configure and use the VoIP components successfully. Nevertheless, it should not be concealed that much work is still approaching.