The most significant potential for VoIP is the long-term capability for integrating voice services into your data services architecture. This is where Web service interfaces to voice networks offer the most promise--by wrapping the traditional communication services into well-defined XML messages which are then transferred across standardized SOAP protocols should allow organizations to bring telephony and messaging services directly to their applications.

Back in October 1998, I co-wrote a cover story for Network Computing on VoIP in the enterprise, introducing the technology to our readers and describing some of the deployment challenges that admins should watch for. What's interesting is that every time I've gone back and reread that article, I've expected to find it completely outdated, with most of the early problems resolved and newer challenges in place. But instead I keep finding that most of those old problems still exist in one form or another, even though we're now closing in on that article's 10-year birthday.

The CS50-USB is an excellent add-on device for those who can get by with soft-phone telephony, and can afford to buy it (or can get somebody else to pay for it). It's one of the more innovative products around, and is very good at what it does.

If 1997 was a banner year for the networking industry, bringing a hoard of new technologies and products, then 1998 was the morning after, with most of us trying to make 1997's technology work. Rather than giving us whole new technologies, vendors spent 1998 trying to fix the half-baked technologies that were introduced in 1997. Sometimes it worked, with some products and technologies permanently altering the landscape, while others just proved that some technologies weren't really such great ideas after all.

Selsius Systems offers a full product suite providing end-to-end connectivity services; the sum of the parts is a fully functional virtual PBX on your existing LAN. We tested a handful of Selsius' 12-button speaker-phones and software-based virtual phones, a dual-line analog gateway and call-management software for a couple of months, and found the solution to be more than adequate, though it has some annoying idiosyncracies.

Today's voice-over-IP technology offers better quality, higher levels of audio fidelity and stronger support for industry-standard protocols, such as H.323. But there are still lots of holes in the technology and many vagaries in the implementations, leaving it an expiremental solution for most corporate networks today.

Support for forward-compatibility in network design is becoming a crucial issue, particularly as new technologies that push the envelope of network utilization are being deployed. As a result, many of the core elements of today's data networks are being retrofitted to allow these new technologies to work reliably. In some cases, entirely new protocols are being developed to get around those protocols that are so inflexible that they cannot accommodate any sort of tweaking.

For years people have been saying 'when we get better bandwidth to the user...' and other such nonsense, conveniently ignoring the fact that they couldn't handle all of us in the first place. With 1.5 Mbps available to me, I'm now able to exceed what many sites can give.

Every so often, a product comes along that has the potential to change the way we work. Although Novatel Wireless' Minstrel Wireless IP Modem isn't earthshaking on its own, when used in conjunction with a 3Com PalmPilot Professional or IBM WorkPad handheld computer and some Internet-based applications, it's a dazzler. It allows truly mobile, wireless, pen-based access to standards-driven applications.

Let's face it: ISDN just hasn't hit mainstream status. The only people I know who use it are professionals who can comfortably be classed into the technology-enthusiast or early-adopter markets. There is a real, identifiable, justifiable need to make using ISDN a simple, plug-n-play experience.

ZyXEL, a company well-known for its analog fax and modem technology, has developed the Prestige 128 ISDN Bridge/Router, an exceptional product that performs most of these tasks very well. This product comes with one ISDN port and two plain-old telephone service (POTS) jacks, providing everything a home office needs for central site or Internet connectivity. The Prestige 128 is one of the most impressive SOHO and Internet access routers we've seen.

For those of us who spend lots of time on the Internet, using a modem for hours on end is just plain annoying. The call setup time seems to take forever. You're always disconnecting just before you remember another site you want to visit. You tie up your telephone line, and the bandwidth constraints drive all of us batty.