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Technology Stocks : FunPhone.com planning to go public? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Razorbak who wrote (145)	3/31/1999 7:37:00 PM
From: Jorj X Mckie	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 647

Razor, There are several components to the FunPhone story and the ones that are specific to FunPhone seem to be viable, technologically speaking. I was very skeptical up until the point that jbIII posted an article published on March 4, 1999 about another company that was using the resonance of the monitor glass as a speaker and microphone. This was an independently published article that had nothing to do with FunPhone, so I didn't have any choice but to become a little less skeptical. However, I have to believe that a Java Applet would run a little slow and delay is a key issue in voice applications. When I spoke with Nigel Bruce today, he indicated that the acoustiphotoelectricthingiebob was much more efficient than a software vocoder which would normally take 25 milliseconds to compress the voice signal. He said that FunPhone only takes 25 microseconds to code and compress. A real issue will come up with the QoS (quality of service) abilitities (or lack thereof) of the internet. The internet is a veritable jitterfest (delay and delay variability) and voice communications are not very effective in this environment. The only way to make up for the delay variability is to add buffers...which adds, as you might have guessed....more delay. Mr. Bruce assured me that they have a way to give voice traffic higher priority over normal internet traffic, but I am skeptical of this. Then comes the local access fees that must be paid to the RBOCs. This means that for every call that is made, FunPhone will have to pay at least $.027 per minute to the local carrier. This is an incremental cost FunPhone and means that their operating expenses go up with usage. How are they going to pay that so that they are a money making proposition? Hope that helps, JXM