Russell,
FNET by design, was geared for the corporate customer, that's not to say that you (an individual) cannot enjoy some of the inherent advantages that are incorporated into the foundation on which FNET was built.
For example, it will be a National service provider, utilizing the infrastructure of state of the art, fiber optic network (LDDS Gridnet)
as the backbone. This will allow a higher performance than most ISP's offer. It also establishes a great foundation on which to build the telephony network, fiber optics are key to better audio clarity. By utilizing Gridnet's state of the art technology, more secure lines, and 24 hour service is guaranteed. They also will provide local access to approx. 80% of the popualation base in the US.
But, most of what I mentioned is what you would expect from a quality supplier and really doesn't differentiate FNET from the rest, at least not in an apparent way to the common web surfer, but it will mean something to the corporate account that depends on the internet for email, fax, data, and other business related services.
What will really seperates FNET from the pack, and the premise on which FNET is being founded, is a rich set of high end services, such as voice, video, fax, and secure high speed data transmission. The voice and video also combine to serve as video conferncing, of which, has become a very high demand corporate alternative. It's this voice, or internet telephony that will establish FNET as a Internet communications company capable of delivering long distance service at a fraction of the cost. This is what FNET is all about, and Franklin's proprietary hardware will make this all possible.
Franklin's ability to produce high speed communication hardware, combined with software, creates a voice server. The problem with delivering quality voice communications over the Internet is that it drops packets of information. To better understand this, consider video, of which a few frames are dropped, and what you see is a little jerky. In voice, if it drops packets of audio, what you hear is kinda garbled. The problem is very complex, mainly because of the way the internet routes information, this is fundamental, based on the way the Internet was designed. So, you have to figure out a way to send several packets of information, bundled together or routed so that they show up in the proper sequence and on time. As you can imagine, it takes two sides (hardware and software) working in unison,to get the right combination of effecient transmission to produce clarity on the receiving end. No easy task.
Once this has been successfully achieved, it fundamentally doesn't matter if the info packets are audio or video, the basic logarithms would be pretty much the same, I would think.
The reason why I went into this amount of depth, is to illustrate that not everyone will be able to provide this type of service, and that is what will truly separate FNET from the pack.
Hope this helps.
RB |
