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Microcap & Penny Stocks : DGIV-A-HOLICS...FAMILY CHIT CHAT ONLY!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Secret_Agent_Man who wrote (11102)	6/4/1998 7:23:00 PM
From: A-MAN	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 50264

From today's Boston Globe's Business section: Don't miss the last paragraph, DGIV fits well into it!!! Haven't learn how to bold face on SI yet. A 'Net gain for phone users By Hiawatha Bray, Globe Staff, 06/04/98 Never mind about Web browsers. Right now the most interesting Internet action involves that little computer terminal you use to order pizza. Your telephone. It has been part of a computer network since the 1960s, when the old Bell System began swapping its mechanical phone switches for computerized ones. But this is one computer network that hasn't been redesigned for the era of the Internet, until now. Suddenly, we're seeing companies offering long-distance calls over the 'Net for 8 cents a minute or less. This isn't the old pipe dream of using desktop computers to place ''free'' calls. Those calls were worth the price, with tin-can acoustics and long pauses between words. But now the techniques for sending voices over the Internet have gotten good enough to shake up the industry. Take a look at Qwest Inc. of Denver. This firm has laid over 5,400 miles of fiber-optic cable along railroad rights of way. It's Qwest's own network, using the same software standards run on the public 'Net. But Qwest uses its system to carry long-distance calls for residents of nine cities, including Los Angeles, San Francisco, Denver, and Salt Lake City. The price - 7 1/2 cents a minute, all the time. Did I mention that you don't need a computer? Any phone will do. Just dial an access number, your password, and the number you want to call. Then there's IDT Corp., a little Internet provider in Hackensack, N.J. It's peddling long-distance phone calls over the Internet at 8 cents a minute. I tried it on a call to my niece in Chicago. The voice quality was sub-AT&T, and I certainly wouldn't have heard a pin drop. But it was quite adequate for a how's-the-old-neighborhood chat. Once again, the Internet is forcing a major industry to rethink its way of doing business. And this time the rethink is rooted in the fundamental design of phone networks. Ever since Bell's day, phones have been based on circuit switching. That's an engineer's way of saying when you make a phone call, one electrical circuit is entirely tied up by your chat, even when you're just doing heavy breathing. Quite a waste of bandwidth. On the Internet, all communications are diced into small blocks of digital data, called packets, and a transmission uses only as much of the line's capacity as it needs to send those packets. That way you can shovel a lot more data down the wire. The phone companies have caught on. By using Internet-style packet switching instead of circuit switching, they get maximum use and profit out of their networks, even at lower prices. They'll have to tear out their old-style switches, but they can continue to use their existing wires. Besides, nearly all the growth in telephone use is coming from data transmissions, anyway. So phone companies build packet-switched systems to handle this extra traffic, while they gradually retire the older circuit-switched system. Some industry-watchers once thought Internet phoning would terrorize established phone firms. Instead, they're falling in love with the idea. AT&T has launched its own trials of Internet-based telephone service right here in Boston. And on Tuesday, Sprint announced a dramatic overhaul of its network, featuring an advanced packet-switching method called ATM. In a few years, the Sprint network will use exactly the same processes to transmit grandma's phone calls and her e-mail. One reason Internet phoning is so cheap is that it's not subject to special fees that traditional phone companies must pay to maintain phone services in poorer areas. The FCC has said this tax break will vanish once Internet-based phoning takes off. So Internet calls aren't going to get much cheaper; there may even be some price increases. Still, with today's technology, any company with a nationwide data network can become a long-distance phone company almost overnight. That means plenty of competition to keep prices down. And since the Internet covers the world, these companies are also driving down the cost of international calling. Imagine a day when calls to Tokyo and Toledo cost pretty much the same. Makes the browser wars seem trivial, doesn't it? You can reach Hiawatha Bray at bray@globe.com