,.-"-.,.-"-.,-"-., OF INTEREST TO SOME --- ¥¥¥¥¥¥
So many just don't understand that the company is always willing to communicate, figured I'd try my luck and sent a letter to the CEO.
Here's the text of my question followed by Dr. Barker's response:
>Dr. Barker -
>
> Do you think that the anticipation of a potentially non-tariffed VoIP
>situation may have resulted in some indecision from potential Be There!
>customers, and do you think that the recent statements from the FCC may
>have indeed better clarified this issue to the marketplace?
I have not seen VoIP as an impediment, but rather an opportunity for Be There! sales. VoIP has been creating confusion in the market, because it is so many different things to different people. It is being used by some as a way for doing telephony over the LAN or campus network. It can work well in this setting if the LAN is underutilized and any routers within the campus net are either seriously underloaded or support QOS guarantees.
VoIP is also being used in the context of private WANs or VPNs. If a company has leased line, frame relay, ATM, or a similar private or semi-private network, and either (1) the net has lots of excess capacity, or (2) it has sufficient excess capacity and it supports QOS guarantees, then the company can deploy VoIP to link together their offices, often at the sacrifice of some quality.
VoIP is being talked about, and is probably starting to be rolled out, by some ISPs, whose networks support QOS guarantees. These providers are able to offer VoIP service to their customers who use that ISP to connect multiple offices, or in some cases, between companies that subscribe to their service. It is generally accepted that these services, which require the ISP to dedicate bandwidth to the QOS connection even at the expense of other customers, will be priced higher, and will not be $0 per minute.
VoIP is also used by hobbyists to communicate over the Internet generally. These communications are $0 per minute, but are more like ham radio than like telephony. Generally, in order to obtain low enough packet loss rates to enable acceptable speech, round-trip delays of the order of 2 seconds are required. This results in a protocol in which you talk, say over, wait a couple of seconds, and hear a response. This is clearly not acceptable for normal business communications.
None of these uses address the issue of how to do remote access. Some of the vendors talk in terms of a remote access solution, but are targeting people with DSL or high-speed leased-line service to their home, so they become part of the normal network infrastructure.
IP is the wrong layer to do the voice/data multiplexing on a dial-up or other low-speed line. IP is not designed to deal efficiently with the small, time-critical packets that characterize voice over slow, error-prone lines. Be There! is the only product or technology available that allows efficient data access while simultaneously supporting business-quality phone calls. As such, it is the only technology which offers a solution to the remote access piece of the VoIP opportunity. It is in this context that Be There! is attracting heightened interest from certain potential partners in the computer and communications systems markets.
It will also be interesting to see, as our patents start to issue, what impact they may have on this market, though I must as always caution that patents are seldom of strategic value in technology markets.
I hope this answers your question. If I can help further, let me know.
/Ben |
