All-
Here is the NY Times January 7,1998 article re: APLIO, then Back to Roasting my Chicken!
More Phone, Less Computer, Behind New Generation of Internet Phones
The telephone companies have managed to make a muck of most of their
efforts to catch the Net wave. Their bungling over the pricing and
deployment of ISDN is probably the biggest sore point among computer
users, who curse the telcos everyday for dooming them to a 28.8 world.
But even the dinosaur-like telephone companies still have a thing or two to teach the new upstarts of the Net world. For decades, the established companies have provided high-quality voice service that, for the consumer, is essentially transparent. There is no simpler device in our homes than the telephone.
In the past few months, this lesson that simple is beautiful has begun
to creep into the minds of the small group of companies exploring the
world of consumer-level Internet protocol (IP) telephony. Instead of
relying on the computer as a telephone terminal - a strategy first used by all the Internet phone companies - they have simply moved voice communications back to where it belonged: the plain old telephone.
Vocaltec, a pioneer in Internet telephone software, introduced last year a software system that allowed people to use their regular telephones to dial into special gateway servers that would route their calls over the Internet. The voice quality is good and the time lag is not very noticeable if the server has a good connection to the Net.
The only problem with Vocaltec's gateway system is that you can only
call in areas that have a gateway system installed. For large companies, this isn't a problem since they can create their own servers, but for consumers it just doesn't work unless you are lucky enough to be in the local calling area of a gateway and are always calling someone who also lives near a gateway.
One of the most interesting services is Jeff Pulver's Free World Dialup II. The service only has about two dozen nodes, although they include such interesting spots as Moscow, Hong Kong, Seoul and Athens.
Now, a French company named Aplio has entered the IP telephony fray with a new product simply called the Aplio/Phone. All it requires of the user is a phone and an Internet connection. You don't even need a computer to use it, although both caller and receiver must have an Aplio device for the system to work.
To use the device, which should be available by February, you first dial the number you want to call. When the person on the other end picks up the phone, you press a button on the Aplio device, which then
disconnects your phone and starts to establish an Internet connection
between the two devices.
The Aplio/Phone will prompt you to hang up your phone and in about a
minute or so, it dials you back. You then pick up your phone and
continue your conversation. This time, however, your voice is being
carried over the Internet.
For the price of just one minute of regular calling, you can now talk as long as you want. If your mother lives in Peking, the savings can be enormous.
The sound quality of the device is very good, largely due to the
dedicated chips inside that handle the compression and decompression of sound. It's also relatively easy to use once you have configured the device with your ISP's phone number, your login, password and other information.
The Aplio devices works through a kind of matchmaking that takes place
over both the regular phones lines and the Internet. The moment you
press the Aplio button, the caller's and receiver's devices identify
each other over the phone lines. They then disconnect from regular phone service and call their respective ISPs. Once they have logged in, each device polls a special Aplio meeting server and begins searching for the device that it had previously identified. Once the devices have found each other, they exchange IP addresses and a connection is made between the two.
Then Aplio/Phone, along with systems like Free World Dialup, clearly
show that Internet telephony is close to being a consumer reality. But
the important word here is "close." It's not quite there yet.
Even though the Aplio device is an advance over the cranky and
hard-to-configure, PC-to-PC variety of telephony, it still falls far
short of the plain old telephone system.
The biggest problem is the lag, which is not Aplio's fault, but is still its problem. The delay can range from 300 milliseconds to about 1 second. Aplio claims that there is an average 500 millisecond delay in conversations. That doesn't sound like much, but compared to the few dozen milliseconds of a typical phone conversation, it can seem like an eternity.
Relaxed conversation is very difficult when you're always waiting for
the other person to finish talking or uncertain if they heard everything you said. While the Internet phones allow full-duplex communications (in other words, two people can talk at the same time), in reality, it ends up more like half duplex, an experience comparable to two-way radio communication.
The lag would be endurable for many of us except that the price of the
Aplio/Phone ($199 for one, $379 for two) puts it well into the terrain
of the exotic. While businesses may find a use for this device, I
suspect only a few consumers will be willing to pay that price.
Aplio and the VocalTec gateway systems are the first generation of
devices aimed at bringing Internet telephony to the masses. There are
still a few more years to go for this technology to mature, but its time is certainly coming. |
