Prepared By Dr. Mir F.
Ali
The last couple of Comdex
Shows were loaded with the booths that were representing
and demonstrating the Internet Telephony Technology and
it is expected that this year there will be more booths
and activities on this technology. Internet Telephony
was indeed a hot topic and it attracted thousands of
enthusiastic visitors from all over the world. Several
seminars were dedicated to provide an update on new and
interesting products and applications that enhance phone
and communications systems. The topics covered in these
seminars were telephony user interface, tying desktop
applications to phone system information, small office
integrated telephony and new Computer Telephony
Interface (CTI) initiatives that are designed to make
the calling easier. This seminar confirmed the fact that
the phone is disappearing, new desktop telephony
applications, and computer telephony integration with
PBX and local phone companies, have turned the phone
from a painful tool into a computer-controlled
communication center.
The Internet Telephony Magazine stated that Internet
Telephony is revolutionizing telecommunications through
the convergence of voice, video, fax, and data. This
exciting new technology promises to drastically reduce
long-distance costs and provide unprecedented
opportunities for re-sellers, developers, service
providers, and end users alike. Telecommuting office
workers and call center agents as well as
video-on-demand are but a few of the potential
applications of Internet Telephony.
It is common knowledge that while the price of the
hardware and software is dropping rapidly, resulting in
significantly lowers computer-processing costs; the
phone rates have not been dropping at a proportionate
rate. The only price break the American public ever got
was due to the fact that Federal Communications
Commission (FCC) enacted laws that broke up the behemoth
Bell system into AT&T and 22 Bell Operating Companies
and this provided the American public with a number of
long distance service companies competing with each
other for a piece of the $90 billion long-distance
market. However, since Internet Telephony is introduced,
these long-distance service providers are terrified with
the idea of being bypassed and losing business to
Internet. They are also aware of the fact that the
American public is very interested in exploring the
possibilities of using this technology simply because
they recognize the potential for substantial savings.
Michael Kennedy, the director of consulting services at
Strategic Networks in Boston, noted that enterprise
users would be the first to realize the benefits of this
unorthodox approach to telephony because they have a
ready-made community of interest. Most large enterprises
already have an enterprise-wide Internet Protocol (IP)
network in place and the business requirement for many
internal voice calls. With this large centrally managed
network and an existing community of interest, there is
no need to wait for demand to develop or for carriers to
rollout new services. Kennedy suggested that the payback
on reduced telephone service charges will be two or
three months or less. Currently, such enterprise
networks pay about 8 cents per minute for internal
telephone calling. With Internet Telephony, this cost
can be driven to 1.75 cents per minute. Additional
opportunities for cost savings are presented in those
jurisdictions where prices are out of line with
incremental costs. For example, many telecom monopolies
charge more than $1.00 per minute for international
calls, while in the same country; Internet service is
priced on a flat-rate basis ($0/minute incremental
cost.) Further savings can be utilized by tying the PBX
to the Internet Telephony connection. With this setup,
any enterprise user can make outgoing calls to the PSTN
from any node on the enterprise network.
It is predicted by Forrester Research of Cambridge,
Mass, spending on telephony is expected to reach $2
billion by year 2004. They estimate that in that year,
consumers will save about $1 billion by not having used
the traditional phone network and with the $2 billion in
Internet Telephony revenue that translates to a loss of
roughly $3 billion to the conventional telephone
companies. This gives a reason for the communications
companies to take notice of this technology.
The use of Internet Telephony is easy and
straightforward. For instance, if a long distance
telephone calls has to be made from USA to Australia.
The Internet telephone caller for instance picks up a
normal telephone in the USA with an intention to make a
call to Australia, waits for a dial tone, then enters a
personal identification code assigned to them by an
Internet Telephony services company. The service then
directs the analog call to a gateway device that
converts it into digital code, which is then broken down
into the packets of data. When the digital information
reaches an Internet server in the destination country,
Australia, it is converted back to the sound of the
voice and typically, sent over local phone lines to the
intended phone number in Australia.
Please click here to see the
diagram which illustrates the phone to phone
environments.
The servers, one for USA and another for Australia,
indicated in the diagram are called Internet Phone
Gateway (IPG). Its function is to take local
circuit-switched telephone calls and turn them into
long-distance packet-switched Internet connections, and
vice versa. When used in pairs, one in the originator's
city and one in the recipient's city, IPGs allow
transparent telephone-to-telephone Internet calls to be
established without requiring users to own a computer.
The experts claim that IPGs can, in concept, be built in
many shapes and sizes, from private single-line units
that tuck into the back of a PBX, to public, multi-line
exchanges that can handle hundreds of simultaneous
connections. Their use, moreover, will be impossible to
detect, as the traffic patterns generated by IPGs will
be virtually indistinguishable from a normal Internet
Point of Presence (POP). After all, bits are bits.
The focus of Internet fax is to communicate with those
organizations or people who are not Internet-connected.
Faxes can either be initiated from a standard fax
machine or from a computer. Typically, fax service
providers supply the Internet faxing software. This
software functions as a printer driver, enabling the
user to fax any documents that can otherwise be printed.
As Mark Flaherty defined the process in his article
published in the Internet Telephony magazine that the
document file is converted into a Group 4 TIFF file that
is then encrypted. First the TIFF data is RC4-encrypted
based on a random seed generated on the desktop. Then
the password and random seed are RSA 40-bit encrypted
based on a public key. Finally, the encrypted file is
uuencoded and attached to an SMTP compliant e-mail
message directed towards the destination fax number @domain.com
(where the domain is the fax service provider’s).
Please click here to see the
diagram which illustrates a FAX Transmission.In a dial-up Internet access setting, the software will
communicate directly with the service provider’s network
into an SMTP mail server. In a LAN setting with a
fire-wall or proxy server, the software is configured to
hand the e-mail message to an internal SMTP mail server,
which then routes the fax to the network. The relative
location of the sending computer and the network’s
inbound fax/mail servers is irrelevant due to the use of
the Internet as the ingress medium.
If the fax is originated from a fax machine, the process
is slightly different. In this case, a hardware device
is installed on the sending fax machine. This smart
dialing device plugs in between the fax machine and the
corporate telephone system. The user sends a FAX in the
traditional manner, feeding a document and dialing the
fax number. The device transparently calls a toll-free
or local number, depending on the sender’s location
relative to the nearest access point or fax node, with
the goal that the sender not incur any additional cost
above that charged by the service.
Businesses are excited with the possibility of enormous
savings in sending international faxes, which this year
will cost them upward of $7 billion. In a recent
Forrester survey of 52 large corporations, 42 percent of
telecommunications managers said they expected to use
the Internet to send faxes or to make calls by the end
of the century.
The diagram presented above illustrates the fact that
regardless of whether a fax is sent from a
computer-to-computer, computer to fax machine, fax
machine to computer or fax machine to fax machine in all
four cases the data is being transmitted and therefore
there is no need for any conversation.
Michael Kennedy disclosed in his article that Internet
Telephony offers more than cost reduction. Hot links
from Web pages to call centers can now be constructed
using technology from Dialogic, Inter-tel, Lucent
Technologies, Micom, ViaDSP, and Vienna Systems among
others. Internet telephony can be used to establish
multimedia conferences among enterprise-users. Under
this scenario, employees can share white-boards,
documents, and voice conversations using the enterprise
network and similarly configured workstations. This
application is less likely to catch on quickly because
it requires a great deal of compatibility among
computers, software, and documents. These obstacles are
not encountered when the telephone set is used as the
I/O device.
While many people are convinced that Internet Telephony
is revolutionizing the telecommunications, John Sidgmore,
CEO of UUNet, noted, “we are not big believers that
Internet Telephony is going to take over the
circuit-switch phone network. Uunet is a large Internet
service provider owned by Worldcom Inc. There are people
who agree with Sidgmore that Internet telephone calls
are of typically low voice quality as the data is sent
over Internet in digital packets of information, instead
of the steady stream used in analog phone service. There
is a possibility that Internet telephone conversations
can sound scratchy or can even break off unexpectedly.
Furthermore, it is often still not possible for a user
to call someone who uses a different Internet telephone
service.
It is not surprising that telecommunications and
computer giants started taking interest in Internet
Telephony. They know that these initial inefficiencies
associated with this technology will be overcome soon
and they started positioning themselves strategically to
capitalize on the potential offered by this technology.
Deutsche Telekom A.G. of Germany paid $48 million for a
21 percent stake in Vocaltec Communications Ltd., an
Israel-based maker of the gateways that are critical to
Internet traffic.
Microsoft recognized and anticipated the need for a
general telephony interface to enable applications to
access all the telephony options available on any
machine and the need for making the media or data on a
call is available to application in a standard manner.
The introduction of Microsoft’s the new version
Telephony Application programming Interface (TAPI) which
provides simple and generic methods for making
connections between two or more machines, and accessing
any media streams involved in that connection. It
abstracts call-control functionality to allow different,
and seemingly incompatible, communication protocols to
expose a common interface to applications. TAPI 3.0 is
designed to scale from the smallest business up to the
largest organizations and indeed it was an excellent way
of capitalizing the niche existed with Internet
telephony.
AT&T is also becoming involved. It has helped finance
the ITXC Corporation. The ITXC Corporation is developing
technology to provide settlement and billing services
for calls routed across gateways from one carrier to
another. We intend to take a lead role in it,” said Tom
Evslin, vice president of AT&T WorldNet, which develops
Internet-related services for consumers companies. He
also said that AT&T specifically elected to take the
best coding and compression researchers from Bell
Laboratories and put them into AT&T Laboratories to help
develop Internet telephony products that would raise the
level of sound quality and reliability of such services
from what is currently offered.
AlphaNet Telecom, a Canadian company, has signed a deal
with Sprint to connect IPGs in some 170 cities around
the world, creating a unified commercial Internet phone
network right on Sprint's 35-Mbps backbone. These 170
cities account for some 75 percent of the world's
international long distance traffic.
AlhpaNet's strategy is to design its system to handle
high-quality voice but enable it to distribute only fax.
Users make a regular fax dial-up call to a local IPG,
which transfers the call over the Internet to the remote
IPG. The remote IPG then dials out to the recipient's
fax machine. The point, of course, is to bypass the
international long distance carriers, who charge in
excess of $1 per minute for a service that costs a few
pennies per minute to provide. Because fax is usually
regulated as an enhanced service, operators are exempt
from most restrictions that apply to anyone offering
voice. Since one third of all telephone traffic crossing
the Atlantic and one half crossing the Pacific is fax,
AlphaNet believes it can make plenty of money without
pushing the regulatory envelope.
Internet Telephony is providing telecommunications
customers with additional choices. Mr. Sidgmore sees two
markets are developing: one for the lower priced, and,
for now at least, lower quality Internet telephony
service, and the other for the greater quality and
reliability of conventional phone services. The point
is, we are going to let the end user choose how much
they want to spent to call London, and what quality they
want to pay for. He said. |
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