At 10:47 AM 7/23/96 -0400, W Lee Nussbaum wrote:

On Mon, 22 Jul 1996, jim bell wrote:

...

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.

...see IDT's Net2Phone product, at http://www.net2phone.com/; it does what you describe. Two notes: (1) I haven't used it yet; (2: disclosure) I'm now employed by IDT, though in a different area.

Excellent! It seems that the one remaining piece in the puzzle is financial motivation. Many ISP's might hesitate to install a "feature" on their systems which has the prospect of tying up some of their lines, with no payback. As much as it pains me to face it, at this point what is needed is some system to pay the ISP's for maintaining and even upgrading their systems to make this whole thing practical. Currently, Sprint is proud to announce that they charge 10 cents a minute for off-peak calls. Could an ISP make money charging, say, 2 cents a minute for a similar service? The main marginal cost is that of an extra phone line, which is probably about $30 per month or $1 per day. Assuming the line is occupied 8 hours per day, that's 480 minutes, which means that the phone line costs 0.2 cents per minute. Even if other costs increase this by a factor of 5 or so, there should be nothing to prevent an ISP from making money off a 2 cent per minute charge or even less. Jim Bell jimbell@pacifier.com