WSJ article on Internet Telephony

[usviszpz at ibmmail.com]

Friday's Wall Street Journel (Feb. 10, page B1, col 6) includes an article on
"Internet Phone," a new software program that supposedly offers intelligible
real-time voice communication over the net.

The article cites potential cost savings of this approach as the primary
benefit of this technology: long-distance voice calls in on-line time instead
of $$/minute over AT&T will be much, much cheaper. Since Internet accounts for
many of us are of low or negligable cost, that angle is indeed significant, but
for the readers of this list it seems to me that the more interesting
possibilities here lie in the potential for bypassing the phone network
and leveraging existing privacy/authentication/anonymity tools for use with
voice communications as well as data. I imagine any privacy buff would like the
option of routing his/her calls out of the (Federally-mandated-wiretap-
compatible) normal phone system. Can this represent a development path for that
option?

{The producers of Internet Phone are listed as VocalTec in Tel Aviv, with
offices in Northvale, NJ; the software is currently $49 (although a demo
version allowing unlimited 3-min calls is free) and currently requires a 14.4
kps modem with a Windows 486, sound card & microphone. No Email address for the
company was given.)

For those for whom this is already old news, I would like to ask: any idea if
this technology is related in any way to VoicePGP? If not, any thoughts on the
development ramifications of this for VoicePGP?

If anybody wants the full text of the article and does not have easy access to
the WSJ, I can get it onto an Email. It may take a little while, though; I do
not have OCR and I'm not the fastest typist.

Regards all,

C.Y.