The government believes the real threat comes from encryption, but they’re wrong … The enabling technology is speech coding, or just data compression in general.
The telcos might even create an alternate Internet, one that bills by traffic instead of bandwidth. They would then market this alternative as the “uncongested” Internet where applications like Internet telephony could reach their full potential … Internet telephony might give the telcos just the leverage they need to take control of the Net.
The arrival of Internet telephony is only likely to push the telephone companies a little faster in a direction they want to go anyway – the Internet-access business.
It’s possible to patch conventional and Internet telephony together such that a person could dial an Internet access provider in his or her local calling area and dial in a city code. The provider could then set up a connection with another provider in that city – all for the cost of a local call plus change. Using area Internet providers in this way allows the caller to bypass the long-distance circuits completely. A technology like this may well capture a significant slice of business.
If all [the] pieces fit together, the telcos might indeed start sweating over lost revenue. Industry analysts have speculated that if the telcos come under fire, they’ll respond by trying to persuade governments to ban Internet telephony altogether.
The spread of 28.8 Kbps modems, ISDN installations, video- and teleconferencing, graphics-intense Web surfing, tens of thousands of Internet users participating in voice chat, voice-enhanced games, and all-day open phone links between friends suggests that several seasons of Net gridlock lie ahead.
Before the year’s out, many Internet telephony programs should support conference calling, call answering, voice-data integration, Web site setups, and other interesting tricks like voice avatars, which allow you to design a voice you like. Probable Internet markets include Internet ham radio, casual social and family communications, event telephony, games, Web tours, talk radio, Web shopping, and “hoot-and-holler circuits.” Right now, hoot-and-hollers act like wide-area intercoms for trading companies that want to alert people in a field to important developments. The lower costs mean that public spaces can be defined at will. For instance, a group of artists might want to connect their respective studios into a group atelier.
The Internet, now a boon for telephone companies, could well become their bane … If I had stock in the telephone company. I would sell it.
What the hell do you think the Internet is for? It isn’t a replacement for radio, TV, and telephones. It’s for exchanging information, not free phone calls … From a store-and-forward perspective, the Internet was a new chapter in the history of human intelligence. It was supposed to lead us somewhere higher, to something better. That some company could then turn this spiritual adventure into another vehicle to support eighth-grade schoolgirls babbling about Luke Perry was nothing short of criminal. Yet all this grousing delayed the spread of the technology only a few hours … the floodgates were open to the chattering hordes.
The Internet has always been a store-and-forward medium organized around e-mail, newsgroup postings, ftp sites, and Web pages; its primary focus is on content and efficiency. From the point of view of this culture, the fate of the Net hangs on the battle between “clueless newbies” drowning the Net in a flood of meaningless babble and the in-groups who understand the importance (as much spiritual as practical) of not wasting bandwidth.