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

To: Kenneth E. Phillipps who wrote (1976)	11/20/1998 8:40:00 PM
From: Frank A. Coluccio	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 3178

Hi Ken, >>What is the significance, if any, of both Arris and ADCT announcing HFC based IP solutions this week? Is this technology going to take off in 1999?<< I think that this is a clear indication that telephone over IP over cable is something that is going to catch on at the application level, and some industry participants will be willing to venture into it. When properly designed and sized, I'm confident that it will become commonplace in cable serving ares in due time. I don't know about 1999 or 2000, however. It may take a little longer than that for a meaningful enough penetration to deem it a success. However, there are probably a lot of older coaxial systems out there that will attempt to use it, who probably shouldn't, IMO. Since there are no standards that I am aware of in place to dictate who can and who cannot use VoIP over cable, I fear that there will be sub-standard deployments that will adversely affect everything that some of the operators come into contact with. They wont be substandard at first, I should want to point out, because of plenty of open space in the available cable frequency spectrum, and on the backplanes of concentrator boxes in the head ends, which is due to the fact that cable modem deployments themselves have not approached heavy levels of penetration, much less saturation, yet. But once utilization has increased to the point where contention is a factor (Hey! we're talking about a great big ethernet-like collision domain here, in most cable IP telephony systems), then voice will suffer along with data because there are no QoS hooks in place yet, or at least none that everyone has agreed to. By extension, this may impact the acceptance and the uptake of the technology, hindering it for some time. Consider, if I phone you from my high-quality Class 5 end office environment, and you are on the receiving end of one of these sub-standard and ill-engineered VoIP over cable (lets just call it cable-iphony [copyright - 1998/FAC]) systems, my call quality will be degraded since call quality usually follows the "weakest link" principle. I then find myself without recourse, if I want to bitch to someone and seek a rebate for poor service. Right? Why should I have to pay for a call that is below my expectations and inferior to what I have been used to for all these years, just because you are cheap and use a sub-standard means of communicating to the outside world? At least when I use an LD IP Voice service, I knowingly am the one who subscribes to it and pays, and if it is a sub-standard call, well, I simply got what I paid for, despite the other party's discomfort... because I am paying for it, not them. In the case of cable-iphony, or better yet "cable-if-any," however, it's a much different story, because the out-of-area calling party (i.e., the paying party) is the one who can wind up being affected by the poor service. Just thought that I would counteract some of the hype on this thing. Comments? FAC