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Technology Stocks : Voice-on-the-net (VON), VoIP, Internet (IP) Telephony -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JEM who wrote (479)	4/29/1998 9:20:00 PM
From: Frank A. Coluccio	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 3178

JEM, Thanks for the opener and some excellent questions. I'm accustomed to Cisco's bar raising, and yes, you are correct about them (or should I say, you folks) doing some extraordinary things with VoIP lately. I would add that Cisco is doing it with lightning speed. Many of the things that I consider to be significant you haven't even mentioned, though, like their integration of SS7 capabilites, and the more mundane, but essential administrative hooks, they are working on. But it's your time we're working on here, so we'll talk latency. Before we get too deep into your questions and discuss the accomplishments you've cited, please clarify what you consider to be latency across the "entire" United States. Are you referring to the overall (end-to-end) latency as would be revealed by a ping test between the two extreme nodes, or are you referring to talker latency from the speaker's lips to the listener's ear on the "user" side of the nodes? Big difference. And how was this tested, if you happen to know? In discuss specific terms like ms of latency, it's important that we use some established (or at least agree on) test and measurement conventions, lest we find ourselves discussing different issues together. Testing conventions for VoIP haven't been fully defined and agreed to, yet, therefore I don't know what to make of some of the metrics you've cited, unless you elaborate a bit. You brought up GTE's results, and their reactions to same. Please cite where you are getting this information from, and the conditions under which this performance was achieved. Was it on one of GTE Internetworking's new OC-48 backbones that resulted from the purchase of fiber from Qwest? And were they using one of the Cisco 12000's that they announced they would purchase? If these two conditions prevailed, then it is no wonder that the performance was excellent. It had better have been, 'cause there's nothing else on that backbone, yet, to speak of. More on this parameter, another time. I would tend to doubt that the GTE test took place on a heavily loaded backbone, like their BBN cloud, because those are meshed, using older routing platforms (chuggers), and scheduled for retirement soon, I believe. On the Qwest fiber I would think that it was zero hops if it were coast to coast and nothing on it, still, since it is brand spanking new and very, very fat pipes. In any event, would you happen to know what the hop count was? All of these things would be crucial to understanding the claims that were made and putting them into their proper context, evaluating their merits, and how we should be regarding them. I'm heading out the door right now from the office, to see if I could "get a life," as someone urged me to do today, after one too many tera-bytes of contemplation (and they were right!), so I hope to get back to this with you tomorrow, sometime, or the day after. In the meantime, I'd appreciate those clarifications from you if you can come up with them. Ciao for now, and best regards, Frank Coluccio