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Technology Stocks : IDT *(idtc) following this new issue?* -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: blankmind who wrote (2705)	3/16/1999 12:22:00 AM
From: Secret_Agent_Man	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 30916

\%/+\%/+\%/+\#/+\$/, the last drink is Mine..SERIOUS POST below>>>>> The battle of voice over ip heats up.... IDT's Net2Phone Direct Survives Real-World Labs® Live Tests IDT's Net2Phone Direct service illustrates the state of IP telephony services, with respectable but not perfect quality. Net2Phone Direct provides phone-to-phone calling--no IP packets actually pass into customer sites. The service converts audio into packets at the nearest IDT POP (point of presence), and then uses IDT's private IP backbone to route calls, much like a traditional long-distance interexchange carrier uses its own circuit switches. With 75 POPs worldwide, IDT has a larger footprint than most IP telephony providers. The service offers dramatically reduced rates, often around 10 cents a minute for calls anywhere in the world. At the ComNet show in Washington this past January, Network Computing unveiled Real-World Labs® Live, where we conducted voice-over-IP demonstrations and tested IDT's international long-distance calling service. In the tests, participants ranked the quality of Net2Phone Direct compared with a standard AT&T toll call. We followed guidelines for ranking comparative speech quality as detailed in the ITU-T P.800 specification, using a five-point scale and generating mean opinion scores (MOSC in P.800 terminology). In the first test, 34 participants held conversations with the London offices of Network Week using the IDT service. Testers also placed a call using AT&T's long-distance service, which served as a quality reference. Participants in Washington ranked each call as "bad," "poor," "fair," "good" or "excellent," to which we later assigned the numbers 1 through 5, respectively. As expected, the AT&T scores were quite high, with 62 percent of responses favoring the more expensive service. But it's nonetheless surprising that Net2Phone Direct was rated the same or better by 38 percent of the respondents. AT&T's average, on a five-point scale, was 4.40, relative to IDT's 3.70, a gap that is not as wide as AT&T would like you to believe. (See chart to the right.) Another group of participants ranked the audio quality of calls to labs located at the Straslund Academy in Straslund, Germany, a partner to our sister publication, Network Computing in Germany. Fifty-nine testers listened to live audio samples played during calls via IDT and AT&T, using the same ranking system as the U.K. conversation test. This time, IDT's ranking was even closer to AT&T's: It achieved a 3.69 rating compared with AT&T's 4.10. (See the chart to the right.) The closer ranking in the listening-only test illustrates an important point about voice-over-IP quality. In an actual call, long delays impede the ability to converse. Callers may notice a gap between the time they stop speaking and when they start to hear the other party's response. But delays aren't noticed upon listening to an audio sample. Instead, packet loss is the most important factor, where "choppiness" and unnatural tone quality can annoy the listener. The good ranking indicates that IDT's backbone isn't dropping packets, but the lower scores in conversation tests point to latency as an occasional problem. Although the quality is close to a traditional carrier's--but not quite as good--the toll savings are phenomenal. All our calls ran only 10 cents per minute, compared with AT&T's peak business rates of $1.90 a minute to Germany and $1.58 to the United Kingdom. And even though IDT had to route traffic for the German calls to its London POP (a German location was not yet available), there was no additional surcharge for the U.K.-to-Germany link. btw, i AM GOING TO CHANGE MY GUESS ON WHO THE MEDIA CONGLOMERATE TO PLAIN i DON'T KNOW..... CHEERS