If these people REALLY wanted to promote the use of Internet telephoning, what they'd do is implement a system where an Internet ISP could be "called" over the Internet by a person wanting to place an LD telephone call to that area, and (presumably using A/D and D/A techniques) rather than generating and receiving modem tones, woudl generate and transmit the audio over the telephone line. That way, the target of the call would simply need to pick up the telephone and talk, as he would ordinarily do: He wouldn't even need a computer. He might not even know the call was going over the Internet. The main problem with using Internet telephone is the coordination required between the receiver and the sender. It would be like requiring a fax recipient to be at the machine when the call came in. Perhaps larger companies will install hardware to attach their telephone systems to the Internet, so that an incoming call will automatically ring lines as usual. However, being able to bypass this process for everyone, not just large companies, would be a vast improvment. It would allow motivated people to use the Internet for almost all of their phone calls, not just the small percentage to the few people who happened to have Internet telephone. At 09:48 PM 7/22/96 EDT, E. ALLEN SMITH wrote:
I would be curious if the standards mentioned include any cryptographic capabilities. The PGPhone people might want to look into producing a patch for the Intel (and later Microsoft) programs allowing encryption. (In consideration of fair use, I am both editing it down and putting on the same ad I see (I use lynx).) -Allen
[The New York Times]
_ Monday July 22 6:03 PM EDT _
Intel Unveils Internet Phone Application
SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. (Reuter) - In its quest to make the personal computer an indispensable tool, Intel Corp. Monday unveiled software that will make it easy to place long-distance phone calls over the Internet.
The Intel Internet Phone software is the first to allow users of different types of computers and software to link up, solving a problem that has held back use of the global computer network for long-distance telephone calls, even though it would save long-distance toll charges.
Jim Bell jimbell@pacifier.com