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To: Lazarus Long who wrote (4656)	5/9/1998 1:27:00 PM
From: Lazarus Long	Respond to of 50264

Cap'n... I'm having trouble keeping up! I will try to collate all this and post. Lazarus

To: Lazarus Long who wrote (4656)	5/9/1998 1:39:00 PM
From: Lazarus Long	Respond to of 50264

This is something else Geniusstock posted today on the AMD board... Telcos have to fear Net phone juggernaut Embrace Internet telephony or die is the clear choice for large telecommunications firms everywhere, reports JENNY SINCLAIR. "DO I see all telecommunications companies embracing telephony over the Internet? If they don't, they're dead." The words come from Telstra's general manager for Internet access products, John Rolland. His statement sums up the growing opportunities for Internet telephony but also some of the fears held by traditional telcos worldwide. A recent report from Britain predicted that 15 per cent of all voice calls would be made via the Internet by 2000. A US report valued this year's sales of Internet telephony products at $US80million ($101million). The market's worth is estimated to reach $US 500 million in 1999. While numbers notoriously can be unreliable, what is certain is the potential for enormous expansion in the traffic of voice calls over the Net. Telephony over the Internet is developing in three directions. There's PC-to-PC (this is where you're online and you talk with one another through your PCs), PC-to-phone (you can make and receive calls while on the Net) and phone-to-phone (where a call is made and received using normal phone handsets). By Internet telephony, the industry encompasses more than the public Internet. It includes private Internet Protocol (IP) networks, such as intranets and extranets (a linking of intranets). The technology is often referred to as IP telephony. Telstra last week unveiled its first two IP telephony products: virtual second line (VSL) and icon calling. VSL, with NetSpeak's webphone software, means that, while your phone line may be tied up browsing the Net, incoming calls will be diverted through Telstra's Internet-PSTN gateway to your PC. A mobile phone appears on your screen, which you answer. You can also make outgoing calls. Call quality is about equal to that of a mobile call. The icon-calling service is designed for companies look-ing to generate business or service customers through their home pages. In effect, it offers an icon on home pages which is used to record the phone numbers of potential customers. It is an Internet-initiated call, which can be made from phone to phone or from phone to PC. The real opportunities for PC-PC and PC-phone telephony products lie in services over the Internet. OzEmail launched a service, OzEmail Phone in January this year. It has since established a company for its new business (OzEmail Interline), franchised its business in the US and is looking to expand into Asia and parts of Europe. All this growth says something about the threat telephony poses to telcos around the world. It says something, too, of where opportunity lies; traditional communications-equipment suppliers - Ericsson, Lucent Technologies, Nortel and Alcatel - are manufacturing Internet telephony servers. Rolland said that Telstra would trial phone-phone Internet telephony services later in the year. When and whether Telstra launches commercially would depend somewhat on the results of its trials. He revealed the strength of Telstra's interest, however, when he said: "We see an opportunity and we are likely to build [a phone-phone IP service] because we do think our customers are going to desire it." OzEmail figures show the cost of an OzEmail Internet phone call from Sydney to Melbourne for 15 minutes during business hours as $1.25 compared with $4.21 for Telstra and $4 for Optus. For a 15-minute call from Sydney to the US, OzEmail Phn charges $5.50, Telstra $19.32 and Optus charges $17.97 I tried the OzEmail service with a call to Sydney and found no problems with its quality, except a slight hollow sound. A call to the US, however, proved more troublesome; the voice quality was uneven. Rolland said that growth of Internet telephony would depend on the differences between the price of a normal call and an Internet call and whether the disparity in call quality justified the cost differential. He said the differences were not as great as they were made to seem, if OzEmail charges were compared with Telstra's economy rates and flexi-plan savings. "There is a lot of economic theory to be played out in the next year or two in terms of how the telcos respond to this new opportunity and how much these others, the IP people, are willing to deal with issues such as scalability and international standards."