The International Packet Communication Consortium (IPCC) is presenting the VoIP Technology track this week, a comprehensive series of sessions looking at how real network operators have been implementing the communication systems of the future.

The objective for all the sessions, says Michael Khalilian, president and chairman, IPCC, is to look at some successes and challenges, and how service providers and vendors went about solving those challenges. These include issues in operations, security, regulation, applications and services for enterprise and residential.

Khalilians session, Migrating PSTN to SIP, will focus on actual service providers who are migrating their networks to VoIP. One of the main challenges, says Khalilian, is integration of systems and modules for VoIP. And there are multiple options for solving that challenge that we are going to be discussing at the sessions. The advantage of VoIP is that you can have different modules from different vendors in an open architecture, but that is a challenge as well. He adds, We are going to say, Here are actual implementations and here is how they have done it.

Among the presenters is Mark Richards, president of VoX Communications, a subsidiary of eLEC Communications Corp., which has built a network infrastructure using multiple vendors and Linux servers. The challenge was how to make it all work together, says Khalilian. So he used Linux as glue between vendor products and network products.

Another topic will be disaster recovery, highlighting how VoIP communications often survive a disaster when other networks fail. Other presenters are Anurag Goel, founder, executive vice president of business development and chief strategy officer of BayPackets Inc., and Farshid Mohammadi, general manager of switching at UTStarcom Inc.

From the regimes for directory infrastructure, security, interoperability and SLAs necessary for end-to-end VoIP to issues of ownership, clearing and settlement, and regulatory compliance, the session, ENUM, SIP and VoIP Interconnectivity, also organized by the IPCC, will focus on the combination of technical and business issues to establish a global directory infrastructure for VoIP.

Central to these discussions is the use of the domain name system (DNS) specifically, ENUM as the directory protocol to determine if a dialed number is VoIP, and to resolve the end-address of that number.

The discussion will focus on the economics of ENUM, a dynamic area of the industry. There are two forces at work: VoIP and regulation, says moderator Manuel Vexler, CTO of CopperCom Inc., vice president of the IPCC, and chair of the SIP Forum

Service Provider Working Group. As a result of deregulation, many companies are trying to get number blocks, especially in areas with high demand, because that can translate to money. There is value in numbers in New York City.

VoIP does not require the telephone numbering plan, especially for VoIP-to-VoIP calls. When you go back into the PSTN, you want to reconcile to the IP database the reference to the number, says Vexler. So there are a number of initiatives here because companies think there is value in the database.

Participating on the panel are Tom Kershaw, vice president of next-generation services for VeriSign Inc.; Mahshad Koohgoli, president of Nimcat Networks Inc.; and Dennis Morton, vice president of product commercialization at Global Crossing.

Also featured in todays VoIP Technology Track is Next Generation Operations Systems and Security, moderated by Hanafi Meleis, president and CEO of Trendium Inc., and co-chair of the IPCC, who will explore new developments and products to automate management of next-generation networks and services. The key to solving these issues often lies in the operation support system (OSS), and service-management tools and processes.

To complicate the issue further, services must work across various technologies from previous and current infrastructure to next-generation networks. Hence, TDM OSSs must be integrated with next-generation operation support systems to provide a consistent set of tools for provisioning, monitoring and troubleshooting, as well as VoIP security.

Presenting in the session will be John Wind, chief marketing officer of SipStorm Inc., a wholesale provider of converged applications and services; Anil Reddy, president and CEO at Kancharla Corp., a provider of wholesale hosted and managed VoIP services; and Payam Maveddat, vice president for Tekelec Inc., a provider of network infrastructure and applications.