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

To: Lazarus Long who wrote (28181)	10/3/1998 6:48:00 PM
From: Ronaldo	Respond to of 50264

From an article on Gateways at PCMagazine: -------- Voice over IP: Other Applications VoIP in Your Life The gateway solutions in our feature present just one scenario in which VoIP technology makes an impact. Consider three others. Frank J. Derfler, Jr. Talk To Me An interesting VoIP application that's poised to take off is voice-enabled browsers. Imagine that you're shopping at an e-commerce site; you click on a product and are immediately connected to a live human being who can take your order or answer questions. From a technical point of view, this feat requires little more than putting an IP gateway in front of an existing call center and adding some code to the Web site. (The hope is that customers will have good sound cards in their PCs.) VoIP and Web integration services are already here: MCI and NetSpeak provide a joint service called Click'nConnect, and Ericsson has a service called Phone Doubler Quick Call. Bad-Boy Phone Companies New telephone companies such as Delta Three are challenging traditional long-distance phone carriers by offering cheap long-distance service over the Internet. To use the service, you dial a stream of numbers from any phone (perhaps using a prepaid calling card), connect to the carrier's public VoIP gateway, and hitch a ride on VoIP to a point near your destination--typically in another country. From there, the call reaches its destination via that country's local public switched telephone network. The upstart companies anger traditional public carriers and their governments, because they avoid many of the taxes traditional carriers pay and don't contribute to special pools of funds that support Internet access for schools and libraries. VoIP In Every Pot VoIP's future may be much grander than anything seen today. It may entirely replace the circuit-switched public telephone networks used by local and long-distance carriers. Circuit switching, the telephone technology from the first half of this century, provides good voice quality, but it's expensive to maintain. The network is made up of tens of thousands of redundant computerized switches that must be tended by highly paid technicians in telephone switching centers worldwide. If VoIP attains the voice quality and reliability it needs to replace circuit switches with fewer and smaller packet switches, hundreds of phone companies will benefit from enormous cost savings. Signs of interest are everywhere. Bell Atlantic has begun constructing a next-generation long-distance network for the purpose of supporting "audio and video streaming." Sprint announced a five-year, $2 billion development program for the Integrated On-Demand Network, which promises to combine voice and data and cut the cost of a typical voice call by 70 percent. Lucent recently rolled out the PacketStar IP Switch, a Layer 3/Layer 4 WAN routing device with a 64-gigabit switching capacity. It can terminate 16 of the OC48 circuits (32,256 voice channels each) designed to carry the backbone traffic of major cities. VocalTec's Ensemble Architecture product line aims at "widescale deployments of centrally managed, reliable, scalable, and secure commercial IP telephony services." AT&T and VocalTec have teamed up to form ITXC, a company created to provide sophisticated billing and gateway service exchanges for ISPs entering telephony. And coming from the data side, Ascend, Cisco, Nortel, and 3Com are all moving to bring Signaling System 7 (SS7) to their routers and high-level switches. SS7 is the control system for today's long-distance public circuit-switched network. Voice over IP Implementations VoIP covers an expanding range of products and services. Here's a breakdown of the major categories. Technology: PC Web phone Description: Software that lets any PC with a sound card transmit voice over the Internet. Pros: Call any similarly equipped PC worldwide for what it costs to connect to the Internet. Cons: Poor voice quality; requires you to prearrange calls. Available: Since 1995 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Technology: VoIP gateway Description: A hardware device between a PBX and an IP network that transmits voice traffic. Pros: Reduces local and long-distance phone bills. Cons: Variable voice quality; high initial cost. Available: Now ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Technology: Public IP voice carrier Description: An alternative phone company that uses VoIP gateways. Pros: Immune from traditional telco taxes; provides cheap phone service. Cons: Available only in specialized markets; subpar voice quality. Available: Now ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Technology: Voice-enabled browser Description: A Web technology that provides voice access through a browser. Pros: Provides personalized, live customer service for Web sites and e-commerce. Cons: None. Available: In 6 to 12 months ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Technology: Public switched network replacement Description: A large IP packet network that replaces traditional circuit switching. Pros: Much cheaper to support than circuit switching. Cons: Variable voice quality. Available: Over the next 10 to 15 years