Services and integrated consumer devices for purposes such as telephony, entertainment, security or personal computing are constantly being developed, designed and converged towards a communication standard that is independent from the underlying physical connection. The cable network, for instance, first designed for transmitting television to the consumer, can now also be utilized for sending e-mail, surfing the Web or even monitoring a network camera sending live pictures from another continent. Furthermore, these features are also available over other physical networks, e.g. telephone, mobile phone, satellite and computer networks.

This white paper introduces the central components of IP-based network technology, and in doing so it will demonstrate the tremendous benefits this new technology has to offer.