SPIT on VoIP.

If your company is like thousands of others, your phone will soon be delivering spam with your morning voice messages. Along with that message left by a client the day before will be sales pitches for wonder drugs and pornographic Web sites. Some of those messages may contain viruses or worms, waiting for you to listen to the sales pitch before uploading to your network. Sounds like your e-mail problem all over again, doesn't it?

Spam over Internet telephony, or "SPIT," is one of the challenges organizations will face as they migrate toward converged voice and data networks. There are others, such as ensuring voice quality over a data network and maintaining call availability, but SPIT is sure to get most of the attention as voice-over-IP telephony systems gain traction.

Adoption of VoIP is expected to accelerate in the next few years, and with it will come the need to secure voice networks (and, by association, data networks) from spam and viruses. The Telecommunications Industry Assn. (TIA) reports that IP backbone and core traffic accounted for 58% of network traffic in 2003. TIA predicts the IP market will reach $18.7 billion within two years, from an expected $13.9-billion level in 2004.

A portion of that traffic is VoIP which, according to a survey of Communications News subscribers, also is growing rapidly. When polled last year, 40% of subscribers said they planned to purchase VoIP technologies in 2004.

According to TIA, "This projected growth reflects that companies are beginning to migrate to convergence technologies to enhance productivity, reduce costs and upgrade the enterprise network to accommodate new applications and technologies."

Clearly, convergence has become mainstream. After years of small-scale test implementations, organizations are extending their VoIP deployments throughout their operations. The productivity and cost benefits, however, should be balanced by the security and voice quality/reliability needs and expense as these systems replace legacy voice networks.

As yet, spammers have had little reason to target VoIP users, who still represent a small percentage of phone users, particularly in the consumer market. As adoption rates grow, however, telemarketers and spammers will see a lucrative new market segment for their messages. Undoubtedly, new ways to market to you via your IP voice network will find their way to your headset.

VoIP, for example, allows telemarketers to send messages to thousands of IP addresses at a time, just like e-mail. If one of those callers reaches your legacy phone now, you can simply hang up. If your answering machine takes the call, the telemarketer usually hangs up. With VoIP answering, however, every call is recorded and each must then be at least partially listened to (or read on the phone's screen) and deleted.

All of this does not mean your organization should avoid convergence technologies; the benefits might be too great to ignore. Just remember that VoIP brings with it many of the challenges of your data network, and maybe a few more.