The FCC decision to end the value pricing on UNE-P set in motion significant changes in the service provider market, particularly for the companies that have never operated their own facilities. Those companies now have to look for alternatives: new ways to provide services that arent subject to the challenging new pricing for UNEs.

VoIP can provide alternatives for those carriers, but there is a steep learning curve ahead of them to grasp fully the technical details and the market implications of this new technology.

The International Packet Communications Consortium (IPCC) has crafted a track at CompTel/ASCENT that will provide an overview of this technology, aimed at showcasing the most important technical aspects of this new technology.

VoIP, the IPCC believes, brings new alternatives, and new advantages, to carriers they can exploit to maintain their businesses. We will say, Here is what the VoIP world can offer, says Manuel Vexler, vice president, marketing, IPCC, principal of Integra100, and moderator of Endpoints in Residential and Enterprise VoIP on Wednesday from 11 a.m. to noon.

One of the overall challenges that the IPCC sessions will tackle is how to choose and put together the right infrastructure for VoIP services. We are watching for all the new services, and figuring out all the issues in delivering those services, says Michael Khalilian, chairman and president, IPCC. We work with service providers and vendors to come up with recommendations on architecture.

Khalilian will moderate Session Border Controllers, a session in which the speakers will provide the state of the industry, and success stories and challenges of session border controllers, he says.

One of the first issues is to define this new, sometimes-hard-to-grasp piece of infrastructure. A session border controller is a median to connect to the points of the network, and for firewall and security functions, says Khalilian. In an IP network you need a router firewall; but, when you have an application such as voice, that firewall is called a session border controller. The IPCC will announce a new architecture document that it has created with border-controller manufacturers and service providers, and is available for the first time at the CompTel/ASCENT show.

Another session, Service Creation, Advanced VoIP and Packet Services, moderated by Peter Briscoe, CEO of Convedia Corp., will compare how traditional phone network are customized using AIN (advanced intelligent networking), with how VoIP networks are customized. That is an advantage of IP, because you can customize it easily, says Khalilian, and be different from the service provider across the street. Carrier executives rightly dont want to be first deploying a new technology. They want to be second or third, Khalilian says. For that reason, the sessions will highlight deployment successes, as well as the challenges.