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To: Ilaine who wrote (23433)	10/2/2000 11:27:52 AM
From: Jorj X Mckie	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 436258

The regulations issues for VoIP are pretty interesting. Very hard to tariff it differently than say a jpeg download since it is all just data. The expectation is that what you will see is flat rates with different service agreements with different levels of quality and delivery guarantees. In some business models, voice will be provided as a loss leader to get the data business (free long distance if you sign up for our cable data service or free LD if you sign up for our DSL). In order to tariff voice traffic, you would need to be able to identify and then count each packet. The identifying part is easy, the counting and then subsequent billing by packet is an enormous task, so regardless of what regulators want, it will be a long time before it could happen. I once thought that usage based billing would win out over the service agreement model. I no longer think that will happen. In the corporate world, voice has been carried over the data networks for some time. It started out with proprietary WAN protocols over leased lines, then went to Voice over Frame Relay, Voice over ATM and Voice over IP. These methods were used to provide toll bypass for on-net calls between remote offices and didn't really effect the legacy PBX market. The move to eliminate the legacy PBXs and have IP telephones on the desktop has only recently become viable on a larger scale.