5.11 Summary

VoIP offers the potential to radically change the structure and nature of the global communications scene. To do so will require a common set of well-defined and widely adopted standards. Specifications continue to emerge and be refined towards a common set although this is unlikely to reduce to a single specification, if for no other reason than that the approaches to the development of standards documents are not aligned across the various groups developing them. The need to interwork services across multiple technologies and multiple domains of administrative control is therefore fundamental to the development of the industry. Activities, such as ETSI's TIPHON project, have developed to address these requirements and the acceptance of such approaches will form an essential part of the VoIP environment over the next few years.