Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

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

To: Secret_Agent_Man who wrote (11420)	6/6/1998 1:47:00 PM
From: Secret_Agent_Man	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 50264

une 08, 1998, TechWeb News Carrier Flash Point -- Defining IP-PSTN Links By Jeff Caruso "We want to make the phone the most ubiquitous IP device in the world," AT&T CEO Michael Armstrong recently said. Achieving that goal-and thereby joining the Internet to the public switched telephone network (PSTN)-is tantamount to overhauling the Internet, and the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is working hard to make that happen. This week, the IETF's Differentiated Services (Diffserv) working group will hold an interim meeting aimed at accelerating specification and framework documents so they can be submitted for consideration as requests for comment (RFCs) next month. Differentiated services would let traffic be grouped into different classes of service. If users are willing to pay more, their traffic could potentially get through the Internet faster. This capability would first be applied to data, but real-time traffic could follow. The IP Telephony (Iptel) working group, meanwhile, is readying its first draft document on service frameworks, to be submitted as an RFC next month. Iptel hopes to have a draft document defining voice-call-processing syntax ready by August. There are several other working groups-some focused on points of interaction between the Internet and the circuit-switched telephone network; others focused on making the Internet more robust for real-time communications (see chart). Although there is no single overarching framework, these efforts pro-mise to redefine the Internet. "The problem is making the Internet work for voice and business applications, and we're treating parts of the problem separately," said Fred Baker, a Cisco fellow and co-author of several draft documents in this area. Not all the standards work that emerges will necessarily be useful for IT managers, but other standards will, said Tom Nolle, president of CIMI Corp., a consultancy. "Technical people are bad judges of market conditions," he said. In the end, the market will decide what is useful and what is not. Carriers such as AT&T and MCI are watching the IETF activities closely, and plan to integrate the useful standards into their emerging communications platforms as soon as they solidify. AT&T, in particular, has been touting its advanced network services platform, formerly code-named GeoPlex, as a way to offer services in both the voice and data realms. The software, running on central office equipment, is flexible enough that new standards can be integrated easily, said George Vanecek, chief scientist at AT&T Labs. Standards like Diffserv could be integrated into the platform or into services that run on top of it, he said. Unified messaging-that is, making voice messages, faxes and E-mail messages available in one place-is viable with the software. But even with advances in standards, carriers will be reluctant to abandon circuit-switching equipment. "Right now, jumping off the phone network is like leaving a civilized society and going into a no-man's land," Vanecek said. AT&T's Armstrong said that "you can do most of what you want to do on the Internet from a phone," such as check E-mail and perform simple Web browsing. Before that can happen, though, the gateways between the two networks need to be standardized and made scalable, said Rick Wilder, senior manager of Internet technology at MCI. Service providers need to make sure their own infrastructures are ready, he said. Routers must have the right queuing algorithms to give priority to real-time traffic, and voice traffic coming from the Internet has to be presented to voice switches at precisely the amount of bandwidth the switches expect. Service providers are keen on using standards, and Diffserv was launched in part to prevent Cisco's proprietary committed access rate (CAR) from becoming a de facto standard, said Eric Crawley, consulting engineer at Argon Networks. Both CAR and Diffserv use the type-of-service bits in the IP header to specify which packets deserve better quality of service. Although Resource Reservation Protocol once showed promise for requesting and getting quality of service, service providers balked because it's geared toward individual flows, and therefore doesn't scale, Crawley said. Copyright r 1998 CMP Media Inc.

To: Secret_Agent_Man who wrote (11420)	6/6/1998 1:54:00 PM
From: Secret_Agent_Man	Respond to of 50264

USA Global Link Purchases IP Telephony Gear(02/13/98; 5:14 p.m. ET)OLD but good! By Matthew Friedman, InternetWeek In one of the biggest IP telephony deals to date, discount long distance carrier USA Global Link announced on Tuesday that it is purchasing $500 million worth of equipment from 3Com. The deal is part of the carrier's plan to deploy a worldwide IP telephony system called Global InterNetwork with 1,000 points of presence over the next three years. "Our Global InterNetwork strategy is a service strategy and not an enterprise solution," said C. Holland Taylor, USA Global Link's CEO. "Internet telephony is entering a new phase, and the technology has caught up with our business plan." That plan includes the ultimate migration of all of USA Global Link's network traffic to IP networks. "We're building a global IP network," Taylor said. "We'll see a 100 percent move internally, and we'll interface with PSTNs [public switched telephone networks] using the signal protocols of each operator." Analysts see the deal as an important legitimization of voice over IP. The recent entry of players like 3Com has given large carriers like USA Global Link confidence in what many believe is still an embryonic technology. Frost & Sullivan analyst Francois-Eric de Repentigny called the deal a "milestone." "Last year was the year for trials; now we're in a year of deployments," he said. "It shows that carriers and established equipment vendors are taking IP telephony much more seriously. It's a validation of the technology." USA Global Link began building its IP telephony network last year, and it now has 25 points of presence, mainly in northern Europe. Taylor said that he found the high-volume equipment supplier he needed when 3Com announced last month that it was entering the IP telephony market. "We needed a vendor that can keep up, and that we know is going to be around three years from now," he said.