g force for determining whether IPT should be treated and licensed as conventional telephony. Member states are allowed some discretion as to the implementation of the EC's directives, but the EC does not issue telephony licenses; that is left to the member states. However, many issues still require resolution, including wire tapping, interconnection and regulatory fees, universal service contributions, and access to a system that allocates tele- phone numbers and a directory system. European legislators and regulators have not finished the debate on how to treat IPT and are seeking suggestions from the industry on new developments and technical solutions. For instance, regarding wire tapping, Europeans are closely observing any new developments in the United States. In particular, at the FCC, VoIP is by default treated as an information service and currently does not contrib- ute to the Universal Service Fund. The next generation of IPT will offer strategic value to the enterprise by com- bining presence-aware communications applications with extended converged net- works. This is possible thanks to two technological advances: first, the ability of extended converged IP networks to unify voice, data, wireline, and wireless domains, supporting applications that unify the end users' communications expe- rience, and second, the continued growth and processing power of bandwidth and storage. As bandwidth and storage become less expensive and more abundant, there will be better and more choices for software services and content. The Next Generation of IPT The IPT evolution has SO far been through three phases: Point-to-point communications over IP networks-These communica- tions are largely based on the use of ITU H.323 standards, a philosophy of having intelligence everywhere. Master/slave architectures-These architectures rely on standards such as Megaco and Media Gateway Control Protocol (MGCP). This approach is an effective way to implement rich feature sets in dumb endpoints. The integration of communications me