Telephone and Internet

Referent: Olaf Strawe
Autor: Christoph Haas

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Internet Telephony
• How does it work?
• Reality and Vision
• Legality
• Status Quo
• So...

Introduction

The Internet has become the digital fashion of the 90s. Besides the email and web services it provides much more. Meanwhile the possibilty of using telephony through the net has developed. Olaf Strawe informed the audience about internet telephony and which services it could take over of the PSTN (public switched telephony network).

Jim Clark (Chairman of Netscape Co.) presented his personal forecast:

The internet telephony will cause much greater changes at the telecommunicatio market than the introduction of tone dialing or the digital phone network.

In fact the proportion of all taking of the voice telephony market is 85 per cent.

Internet Telephony

The term Internet Telephony stands for two things. First it means telephony services using home PCs and a dialup internet connection. This way two or more users in a dialup connection may talk over the net. The user only needs a microphone and a sound card. Using an additional camera (e.g. QuickCam) it is possible to do video conferencing without great expenses. Secondly the term stands for the attempt to find an implementation or packet oriented voice connections. Two different communication networks should be merged that have been seperated by history.

How does it work?

The functionality of Internet Telephony technically corresponds to the normal voice telephony (at digital switching stations). The user's speech will be converted to digital data using the codex technique. The digital data will then be sent to the target user and converted back to analog audio data. The user does not necessarily need to have an internet phone (which is plugged into the computer) but can use his sound card and a microphone instead.

Inventor of this technology was Vocaltec. Their fist client program was named IPhone that was (at the beginning) using the IRC connection. Meanwhile all clients are using their own server and also support the point-to-point protocol. The ITU has set the H.323 standard for real-time data transmission on digital links (H.324 is the corresponding analog protocol because it does not provide a constand bitrate).

Reality and vision

The worldwide phone network has developed in the last 120 years. Internet telephony was first introduced two years ago (in December 1994) and has experienced a fast development this year. Until today 12 to 15 clients of several companies have been published.

The most important question for every experienced web surfer is how high the data rates are. At the moment this is one of the greatest problems in the internet. But it seems that in the future higher bandwidths will be provided as the cables are physically already connected but simply not used by the phone companies. Actually only 20% of the overseas submarine cables are used. In the future a more powerful internet connection is absolutely imaginable.

Provided that the data transfer rate would be acceptable one would only need the matching equipment for the PC. A complete external phone to be plugged to the sound card is already available for $49. Next year Creative Labs Inc. has announced to produce sound cards with a built-in chip providing a direct socket to plug in a standard analog phone.

In addition there is already at least one ISP (Internet Service Provider) that runs gateway into the standard phone network. Any user may do international calls to America now for only $.10 per minute. The principle is similar to that of callback providing.

Legality

Though the Internet Telephony principle make every international call a local call many users worry about legality. No reason to worry, all this is perfectly legal. However soon every ISP and every single user will have to pay a flat rate of $3 to $6 monthly

In the U.S.A. there are still discussions. The ACTA (America's Carriers Telecommunications Association) claimed the demand for the following:

1. Internet Telephony shall be illegal
2. software developers of Internet Telephony clients should be treated as phone companies (with all according duties)

Status Quo

• The Internet Telephony market is growing constantly. In 1995 500,000 users used client programs. Right now there are more than two million users.
• With the introduction of gateways to the normal phone network this service will grow (following an IDC prognosis) up to 60 million users until the year 2000.
• Looking at the NC (network computer) it could sarcastically be said that it is not a simplified PC but an overdimensioned phone. Every NC disposes of a microphone and a loudspeaker but is not really usable as a PC because it lacks a harddisk.
• The QOS (quality of service) is relatively low at the moment because of low data transfer rates. On the other hand the need of light fast connections and crystal clear sounds in telephony is exaggerated. The typical user would accept slower or more noisy phone lines if he had to pay much less. In the future there will probably two phony networks: one will provide expensive professional phone network access (commercial) and a low-budget medium-quality network (private).

So...

There are already a few usable clients for internet telephony. PGPPhone even allows encrypted voice connections. Next month there will be a version for Microsoft Windows. The new 4.0 version of the Netscape Navigator is available the second day now and also serves a client.

According to Olaf Strawe the Internet Telephony service will win recognition. So everybody is invoked to use or at least try a client to assert this new and cheap way of communication.

Christoph Haas

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