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Technology Stocks : The *NEW* Frank Coluccio Technology Forum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Dennis Roth who wrote (490)	7/22/2000 12:00:00 PM
From: Frank A. Coluccio	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 46821

Dennis, thanks for passing that url along. About a year ago I attempted to educate one of the security guards at a client site about the benefits of voip, although I caveated that in many countries you can have your digits removed for trying it. Muhbaruk (Mo) is from Pakastan. It was rather futile at the time, because neither he nor his relatives in Pakastan had computers, and Internet cafes and ISPs were prohibited at the time from supporting voice extensions via the PSTN in his native region. Last night, upon leaving the client's office I passed the upstream news release to Mo. He smiled, handed it back to me after reading it, and advised me again that he was Pakastani, not Indian. [Oops, I apologized.] He also advised me that, since our last discussion, he and members of his family on both sides of the pond had acquired computers and were enjoying VoIP regularly, through the use of applications like paltalk.com (a chat room voip client that permits private rooming), and that he is now trying out hottelephone.com which supports free PC to Telephone to approximately 30 countries, he said, although Pakistan is not one of them. He said that he called an acquaintance in Germany using the latter client application this past week, and that it was very good, free, and far better than the PC to PC variant he was using to call home. But one should take into account the abundance of bandwidth between NY and Frankfurt, and the relative scarcity of bandwidth available to many ISPs in India/Pakastan, many of whom are still backboning at 56 kb/s, and only recently upgrading to E1s rated at 2.048 Mb/s. I've used Excite's push-to-talk voice chat and spoke with folks in Delhi over it in the past, and my experience in those cases were similar: Occasionally, what appears to be high quality, but then you suddenly realize that the majority of syllabic delivery is entirely unpredictable, still. Much (but not all) of this has to do with the choke effect I described above, which is caused by the shortage (or the very high costs) of bandwidth in many regions of the world. I got a very special kick out of Mo offering to describe for me how to download these applications. Yes, we're moving to a very-near-complete wired world. FAC