With the growth of convergence and VoIP, ComDesign has met the challenge of working with telecomunications and data communications management to provide solutions that seamlessly migrate businesses to converged voice, data, and video technology.

• VoIP integration
• IP video systems
• Lower cost cabling solutions for converged voice data environments
• Wireless Technology 

Piping voice and data over the same network could save users big money and improve operations.

At the transport level, convergence means data networks also carrying voice, video, and images. At the user-interface level, it means PCs becoming telephones and mobile phones becoming devices that can browse the Web and send E-mail. At the infrastructure level, it means PBXs and other phone switches being replaced or augmented by servers.

The promise: Companies can lower their communications costs by as much as 40% by pumping voice traffic through the unused space in data networks for a "free ride." Managing and supporting one "converged" network is much easier than managing two or three. And when traffic of all kinds’ rides on the same rail, conventional voice- and data-system vendors can no longer be so proprietary--leading to lower product prices and more innovation.

More important, convergence can help companies create networked multimedia applications that can tie together employees, internal processes, and external partners in more productive ways. Among those applications: Web-integrated call centers, multimedia conferencing, unified messaging, and computer-telephony customer-service apps. 

Momentum Builds

Still, the economic and market momentum toward network convergence is considerable. In the late 1980s, the proposition was for data to ride free on T1 lines leased mostly to carry voice. One reason convergence didn't take hold then was because carriers started pricing their voice packages so aggressively that most corporate telephone traffic ended up on their public circuit switching networks while companies piped their data over separate router-based networks. 

Today, with voice traffic growing only 8% to 10% a year and data traffic doubling each year, more than 80% of all bandwidth will be consumed by data traffic. That means the networks of tomorrow are being engineered to carry data. Eventually, proponents argue, voice will piggyback on data instead of requiring its own separate infrastructure.