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

To: elk who wrote (526)	5/12/1998 4:25:00 PM
From: Frank A. Coluccio	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 3178

Evan, good to see you back here. >>I know you feel that Cisco will have an easier time in transition than Lucent, in regards to the covering these converging fields; << I don't know that to be a fact yet. In fact, I don't know who LU will be in six months, or whether CSCO's direction might not find strong opposition from heretofore unidentified threats. Like Curtis says, the train is moving fast. The question is: Whose Train? And is it moving fast because of intended improvements? Because of inertia of the body in movement variety? Or is it because it is out of control and the engineer is asleep at the controls with his or her hand on the throttle? >>Intuitively, it would seem that Cisco would have harder time ensuring the Quality of Voice, over Data, due to their background.<< See my recent post about stereotyping these players. I don't think that either necessarily has the advantage at this point, or that if either one did it is necessarily because of who they happened to have been in the past. >> Are the issues surrounding the voice quality(clarity) intrinsically different, than those surrounding Data quality? << From a human perception point, yes. Humans make poor data terminals, and must be spoon fed constantly-flowing replications of the sampled sounds coming from the other end of the pipe. They don't do well on interrupts, although the ear can compensate for lost syllabic content. >>It's my understanding that both are packetized... and the delivery of those packets is the key to the quality of both; however, it seems that Voice would be more difficult to handle.<< Both are packetized in VoIP, although conventional voice is said to be framed when viewed in the context of normal T-1 derivatives (DS0s). It's only more difficult if it is placed in an environment that wasn't designed to accommodate it in the first place. And then it is a matter of improving the adaptability of that environment through changes in its original makeup until it more resembles the thing it is attempting to replace, or something better. But not the same thing that it started out being. It's a constant tradeoff question between aural perceptuity and bandwidth efficiency. As it becomes more likeable from the aural perspective, the more costly it becomes from an infrastructure and bandwidth perspective. And keep in mind that the term "cost" carries many different connotations in networking. Nothing is free. Not even on the Internet. Regareds, Frank C.