Gil:
If you are worried about some of the major telephony providers trying to regulate and price-control what comes and goes over the internet, it would pay you to research a document put out by the Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility (CPSR). I believe they will have a lot of clout in not allowing this to happen. This document which came out on May 2, 1996, represents the position of CSPR on the ACTA (a coalition of long distance providers) Internet Phone Petition.
This can be foung at: http:www.cpsr.org/cspr/nii/cyber-rights/acta-comment.html.
As far as your concern for the quality of present internet telephony I would agree. However in my research into this and listening to others on the SI thread, I have come to the conclusion that ftel/dctc has overcome these problems and can offer as good or better quality than what we presently enjoy over the POT.
Its my understanding that it all boils down to how well the eqipment samples, digitizes, and compresses the sound samples at one end and at the other collects and reassembles the "packets" for decompression and conversion from digital to analog. If the equipment performs properly, it doesn't matter how busy or crowded the traffic is on the internet. A fairly good analogy would be how your CD player overcomes bumps in the road by reading and sampling the digitized signals ahead and then fills in the "mistakes" with what it already read. Its a little more technical than that. Oh well.
If the rest of the world becomes as excited about internet telephony as I am, it will definitely grow quickly and by leaps and bounds.
If Davy Crocket were here, he would say "Oh boy, another frontier to conquer, where is my check book!" I believe this is bigger than any of us can even imagine.
Remember these are only my opinions even though I do have an electronics background from the Air Force.
Regards, and have a nice weekend everyone
Norm (as in Glover) |
