I guess it's FINALLY time for VoIP to take off. For those not in the know, Voice over IP is simply using the network that delivers our email and web pages to carry phone calls. The idea is that once the phone call data (your voice) gets translated into internet-speak, it travels across the Internet for the same price as your email, namely free. There are costs associated with the translation from phone call to internet-speak and then back again on the other end, but it makes phone calling extremely cheap, especially internationally.
It's been possible for a while now to take advantage of this possibility with a few different companies (there are links at the bottom of the Wired.com article linked earlier here), but I've heard the lag times and sound quality weren't good enough to make it an first choice option for many beyond the brokest college students. But the tech has matured and the street claims that up to or over 10% of all phone calls are carried over the Internet now and most people don't even realize it. As this becomes more popular, phone rates should plummet even more. Imagine getting 1¢/ minute all day, every day for your long distance charges. I don't know if it will fall that low for international calls, but anything better than the current 27¥/ minute I pay now will be nice.
Before I go on to explain my technological idea that really is the basis of this post, I have to wonder if VoIP is going to affect surveillance technology. It seems on the one hand that putting phone calls over the net can make it easier to eavesdrop (all your email is totally naked, essentially being sent as postcards that every mailman/ISP can read along the way, but of course VoIP calls are encrypted) because the authorities don't have to tap into privately owned phone lines. Then again, the path that the packets take from source to destination aren't predictable, so unless the VoIP call is intercepted at the entry or exit ISP, it might be harder to capture. I don't know enough about the technology behind VoIP to know if this structure of delivering phone calls is more or less likely to exploitation. If it does turn out to be easier to listen in on calls, I'm less concerned about being listened to as I am about the authorities getting overloaded with mostly benign data. It dilutes their power to pay attention if it is too easy to gather info.
But the real issue is that internet packets can be copied and archived as it passes from server to server. This means that old phone calls can be archived and mined well after the fact. So even if the authorities aren't tapping phone calls as they happen, if they want/ need to, they may be able to go into the servers and pull up data on phone calls made days, weeks, months ago. I don't know if I like that at all. Of course, I am fairly uneducated about this tech and maybe regular phone calls are archived like this, or maybe it isn't possible with VoIP, but it seems logical to me. We all saw what happened to Microsoft.
(Sidenote: I am consistently amazed at my inability to get to my intended point when I write these entries. I end up taking a full featured run-up to what I want to say that usually ends up being fully featured enough and far enough off course of the initial idea that it ends up being its own post and the original idea falls by the wayside. Here I go, finally getting to my point though....)
One of the problems with VoIP is that it does have to use phone lines at least part of the way, unless you want to require both parties to use their computers with headset microphones. But people want to use their phones to make phone calls, right?
I use DSL for my internet access which means that my internet and my phone calls travel over the same line. The DSL just uses a higher frequency range (or some other technical element), but the phone line comes out of the wall and runs into a splitter that sends a line to my router and a line to my phone. So I started thinking about why that splitter couldn't be used to transfer phone call data into a format that could be sent out over the DSL bandwidth?
THEN I started really thinking. I have a modem on my computer that hasn't been used and never will be as I prefer to pay the premium price for premium speed. Why can't this modem port be used? Run a line from the phone to the modem port for the voice data to run into and then use the computer to translate and send the data out over the cable or DSL line. I don't know what kind of bandwidth a phone call needs, but audio data is easy to compress rather substantially, so the bandwidth at the modem shouldn't be a problem. Even it if it is, it shouldn't be too tough to build a better modem for cheap (and whatever happen to v.92?).
Anyway, that was my idea. We all have phone ports and ethernet ports, why can't we run the phone into the computer and let it do the heavy work of translating the phone call into VoIP? I'm sure there are good reasons why this isn't possible or hasn't been thought of, but I thought it was a good one.
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Posted by Nutrimentia at January 5, 2004 09:03 PM | TrackBack