DGIV Technology Review for People That Are Not Familiar With VoIP
Hi all:
In this post I shall attempt to give an overview of DigitCom's technology , and why this technology alters the traditional paradigm of telephony.
Traditionally, our mega corporations such as AT&T, and later MCI and Sprint , offered one primary service: namely, they allowed you to speak and have a conversation with someone else without having to physically go there and meet them. The cost benefit of this was tremendous, and these behemoths grew even bigger. Over time, they established their copper wires all over the country, and everyone could call everyone else, for a small per minute fee that you paid the phone company. It turned out that people loved speaking so much, that these corporations not only grew bigger each year, but made huge profits as well. They then invested these profits into laying more copper wires.
Lately, however, people have been wanting to make not only voice calls, but to see the other person as well. Sometimes, they have wanted to have a video conference while exchanging faxes, email; esssetially the paradigm has shifted from "talk as if you are in the same room", to "act as if you are in the same room"... the big companies so far have been quite unprepared for this, in terms of their readiness to give up all the investment they made in copper wires and other technology that cannot support these new consumer requirements. As a result they have one of two choices:
1. Revamp their infrastructure, or
2. Pretend the problem doesnt exist and that it will go away.
Both choices are fraught with a lot of risk. Revamping their infrastructure could be the right way to go, but then its always more difficult for a big company to pull a technology shift off than a smaller one.
The second choice isnt really one, but AT&T,Sprint and MCI seem to indicate a preference for this sort of approach from time to time.
Seeing the opportunity in a multi billion dollar market, hundreds of medium, small, and unknown players have hit the market with varying solutions. Almost all of them, have based their solutions on carrying voice, data, and video over the commonly available Internet.
Unfortunately, the INternet in its present form, isnt quite ready to handle to handle this requirement either, since guess what: most people access their internet using copper telephone wire from home anyways. And like we know , copper aint gonna cut it.
That brings us to the next item: if not copper then what? Well, there's fiber cable. These cables can carry much more information than your typical phone line can. Many medium sized companies, such as Qwest communication, Brookes Fiber, and some untradional ones such as Williams Comapanies are laying fiber all over the planet (starting mostly across the atlantic), and hope to lease it out to their customers. AT&T isnt laying any fiber yet, and that might not be such a good thing for them. Perhaps they plan on leasing fiber as well.
The little guys, are planning services that they can offer over this new infrastructure. Part of their plan, is to use the internet (that eventually will be using fiber for packet transmissions), to originate voice calls, video conferences and faxes. The internet , which is already commoditized today at $19.95 a month, gives all subscribers the ability to send anything over their modems.
Lets say, you want to place a call from New York to Tokyo. If you used AT&T it would cost you $1.00 a minute. For large coporations that maintain offices in New YOrk and Tokyo and communicate daily that could very quickly add up to a lot of dollars.
The other way to decrease cost would be to use your plain vanilla Internet to make calls using one of the many services such as IPhone, etc. The problem with this is that the internet has delays, and your voice calls might end up sounding like something else all together. SO although you made a free "call" you usually dont get much done. This choice isnt worth conidering.
The third choice is to use a local company intranet, which bypasses the public internet. This intranet could be (and usually is ) much faster than the Internet. You could place calls over this now, and voila you've just saved your company a whole lotta money. But if you've got 10000 employees and everyone wants to make calls, the Intranet could slow down as well. Thats where you might consider using a compression agent, that can help alleviate the bandwidth bottleneck. DigitCom has products that can do this. They also allow access to this intranet through a phone call. And they can even help deliver the voice message to a phone in Tokyo instead of a computer on the internet.
Many other companies have the same idea; some will succeed - others will go away. DigitCom has been around longer than the others; so its experience is a good thing. The fact that they are setting up infrastructure to route calls from here to Russia and Indonesia is a wonderful thing. I wonder why they chose these markets first? Instead of the more congested Europe, Singapore/HongKong/Japan area... My guess is its because being first in an internet related market gives you the biggest advantage later on, and Chin recognizes this.
Since this is such a nascent field, its to early to predict anything now. I've stocks in many Voice over IP companies, including DigitCom. I like DigitCom particularly because of the fact that they have existing sales. Most companies in this area dont. Also being first in markets others dont have on their radar is a great strategy. The next thing is to gain visibilty by exhibiting the products, and by using your PR machine.
Thats it folks.
MFDoh! out |
