Intel Corp. and Proxim Corp. have just announced they will collaborate to develop and deliver WiMAX solutions, including base station and subscriber unit access points designed to deliver fast wireless access for data, voice, and video.

“We as an industry are headed toward the ‘broadband wireless era,’ and WiMAX will play a key role in delivering on our vision,” said Scott Richardson, general manager of Intel’s Broadband Wireless Division. “The next wave is about portability, with people wanting access anywhere.

Carriers and service providers are increasingly using voice-over-Internet Protocol (VoIP) for peering purposes to deliver new and enhanced services to consumers and enterprises. Session controllers are devices deployed at the network’s edge and are designed to facilitate carrier-to-carrier peering, carrier-to-enterprise peering, and carrier to consumer peering. In a new report entitled VoIP Is Heating Up The Need For Native IP Peering, Yankee Group explores the session controller market and the VoIP applications driving the need for these devices.

Many incumbent carriers have publicly announced their consumer VoIP plans. AT&T launched its CallVantage service and plans to offer it to 100 markets by the end of 2004; Verizon announced it will have a voice-over-DSL offering in the first half of 2004; and Qwest has a trial voice-over-DSL service in Minnesota and is evaluating its expansion into other markets.

“The features and functionalities introduced by session controllers are valuable to the VoIP market and deployment will continue,” says Danny Klein, Communications Network Infrastructure senior analyst at Yankee Group.

Members of the United States Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation heard testimony on Wednesday, June 16 regarding “The VoIP Regulatory Freedom Act of 2004” (S. 2281) — legislation introduced by Senator John Sununu of New Hampshire, the purpose of which is to enable growth of VoIP by protecting the burgeoning technology from the heavy-hand of federal and state regulation.

Among the witnesses speaking before the Committee, Deputy Assistant Attorney General Laura Parsky told the Senate Commerce Committee that unregulated VoIP would be a “haven” for terrorists unless the government forces service providers to build special wiretapping capabilities into their systems.

“If legal loopholes allow criminals to use new technologies to avoid law enforcement detection, they would use these technologies to coordinate terrorist attacks, to sell drugs throughout the United States and to pass along national security secrets to our enemies,” Parsky said.

Speaking in favor of limiting regulation, James X. Dempsey, Executive Director Center for Democracy & Technology, stated, “The Internet and applications like VOIP … are different from traditional telecommunications services, so significantly different that they have not been and should not be regulated under the traditional regulatory framework for telecommunications. For reasons that are still valid today, the Internet and Internet applications were not included in the regulatory mandates of the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act of 1994 (CALEA).”

As a proponent of VoIP, I believe that a hands-off approach is best policy for the time being.

Insight Research (www.insight-corp.com) released a new report today titled IP PBX and IP Centrex: Growth of VoIP in the Enterprise 2004-2009, in which the research firm states that VoIP phones in the enterprise will not represent the majority of installed PBX base until 2009. Even though shipments of the newer IP-based technology are expected to grow at a compounded rate of more than 20 percent between 2004 until 2009, and sales of the older TDM-based phone systems are expected to decline at roughly the same rate, the report claims that TDM technology will continue to dominate the installed base until the end of the decade.

According to the Insight study, the PBX business will ship about $4.3 billion worth of PBX equipment this year.

In essence this report highlights the inevitable transition to IP Telephony in the enterprise that began some years ago, but has taken off in earnest as of late. To hear that this relatively new technology such as VoIP will supplant 100 years of traditional telecom by 2009 is welcome news indeed!