IP telephony in the enterprise offers significant cost and performance advantages over legacy PBX products. It also enables businesses to have truly converged voice, data and video networks. In the past, a major obstacle for IP telephony in enterprise networks was the assurance to IT managers that equipment was reliable and price-competitive with incumbent systems, and that it exhibited proven productivity gains.

The year 2001 changed everything. New, highly integrated IP phone chips became available with integrated processors capable of supporting both RISC and DSP features, Ethernet transceivers and switches with QoS and virtual-LAN support, analog codecs for audio and a variety of phone peripherals, such as key scan and serial ports.

The availability of these chips is enabling manufacturers to develop a new generation of IP phones at a fraction of the cost of previous generations. The advanced capabilities of these phones allow manufacturers to incorporate a rich suite of new applications that improve client productivity. Additionally, improved QoS and security features, enabled by the integrated Ethernet switches and high-performance processors, provide guaranteed, reliable IP telephony service throughout the network.

These new IP phone chips are driving the IP market from an era of field trials and limited acceptance by only early adopters to mass acceptance. The migration from legacy TDM systems to IP telephony is well on its way.

Paul Shore is director of marketing for VoIP client products at Broadcom Corp. (Irvine, Calif.).