Yalie phone home

KUSHAL DAVE/YH

On most college campuses, logging onto the Internet is hardly a problem. In fact, college students are part of the relatively small group who have easy access to a high-speed, high-bandwidth network. This information superhighway allows virtually priceless communication oppurtunities for people around the globe. Unfortunatley, most people only use this connectivity to send text messages like e-mail and ICQs, when the capacity to have voice conversations has existed for years.

Text is still the predominant means of digital communication, but if Jeff Pulver, who runs pulver.com and his counterparts in the field of Internet telephony have their way, the technology could spread to the masses, especially the masses of connected college students. Internet telephony refers to the series of products and services that allow for PC-to-PC communication or PC-to-phone communication, as well as technology that routs calls from regular phones over the Internet to their destination. The technology is also known as Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP). Unlike traditional phone calls, Internet phone calls require less physical capacity, and digitizing schemes can be used to make them utilize even less bandwidth.

Sure, it's cool, but why is no one using it?

Though the advantages to Internet telephony are readily apparent, VoIP companies have been slow to get their products off the the ground. Companies like VocalTec have released long-distance calling plans that decrease costs by rerouting over the inexpensive Internet. Christopher G. Lews is the manager of Internet Technologies at Millecom, a long-distance broker that is going through the "bureaucratic nightmare" of exploring the new venue. His service will be an Internet Telephony Service Provider (ITSP) that can provide an on-ramp, off-ramp or both to calls funneled through the Internet using hardware and software from VocalTec. "It's something that Millecom felt the future was going to be. There's been a lot of discussion in the whole industry about voice over IPl," he said. The technology, while not ideal, is "good enough."

'We view VoIP as just about inevitable.'  —John Mieckle

The savings that Milecom offers its customers comes at the expense of quality, at least while the transmission of voice over the Internet is in its infancy. "You'll occasionally hear clicks, pops, fade ins, and fade outs," he said, comparing the quality to that of a cellular phone. Still, IP-based systems are already in use through calling cards and chat software, and their popularity is growing.

Yale is watching...

Meanwhile, other VoIP start-ups are focusing on the college market in the hopes that students will be more willing to experiment with the new technology. At Yale, ITS Telecommunications has been keeping a close watch on happenings in the VoIP market. John Mieckle, Director of Planning and Technology, along with the rest of ITS Telecom have been keeping their eyes open—attending conferences, speaking with vendors, and watching the news. "IP Telephony is very clearly a factor in our long term and short term planning," Mieckle said. "We view VoIP as just about inevitable."

Although bids were actually taken from some so-called next-generation telephone companies in the last call for proposals, none actually responded. "VoIP is not yet ready for production service," Mieckle explained, pointing out that most systems are still unreliable, expensive, non-standard, limited in capacity, and of poor quality.

Jeff Pulver's company, pulver.com, organizes conferences, testing, and information dissemination related to VoIP. He suggests that lack of quality may not matter to students who tend to use Internet phone products or calling cards that operate on the new technology. To him, college students and immigrants, with their recurrent and lengthy long-distance calls, are the target markets for venues using current, limited VoIP technology. College students "predominantly are the major users of IP telephony," Pulver said. "Kids don't care about quality, it's assumed. As long as it's connected, it's okay."

Savings, or sound?

However, some students favor quality to cost. John Brittingham, BK '01, has used a web phone, but didn't think the reduced cost made up for scarficing quality. "I used it because it was a novelty, but the voice was all broken up and poor in quality," he said. "I would rather shell out for the phone call with better quality."

'Kids don't care about quality, it's assumed. As long as its connected, it's okay."  —Jeff Pulver.

Asked why student use of Internet voice chat software, considering their ready Net access, tight budgets, and constant need for long-distance communication, isn't rampant, Pulver explained that it probably occurs behind closed doors. "My impression is they don't want to give the impression that they're a nerd," he said. "You have people using it for long-distance relationships; you have people using it to chat back with their parents. I know also on summer vacations, when people go on trips to Europe, they give their kids a list of ISP's, and they expect them to figure out how to interconnect. You also have people who are using it for buddy to buddy or dormroom to dormroom communications."

Saul Rosser, BK '01, has a different opinion. He owns a copy of a voice communication software, but has not used it yet. Why? "I don't know anyone else who owns the same program, so I can't even test it out," he said. "The software is probably cool, but if no one else owns it, its useless."

At the other end of the VoIP spectrum, Milecom has discounted the college market. "We're not seeing the huge rate cut [nationally] that we see when we're competing internationally. So, unless the college student is really, literally penny pinching, and wants to save the two cents per minute, we don't really save the college student a lot on domestic calls. Internationally, we can do wonders," he said.

Will it improve?

Perhaps it will simply take some time for VoIP to catch on with college students and society at a whole. David Levine, Director of Marketing and Communications for VocalTec, creators of InternetPhone, one of the original Internet-based voice chat products, claimed that "college students are reflective of the greater society at large." He added that IP telephony is just beginning its dramatic upward growth after a few years of slow and steady growth. As college students discover IP telephony they will be one of the faster adopter segments."

To Lewis, the Milecom manager, the end goal must still be providing a seamless technology. "Everybody's really, really used to dial tone at the house," he said. "We're used to that level of service. When you're dealing with a PC-to-PC conversation, you're dealing with PCs and you have to do a little tweaking.... obviously our goal for total acceptability is phone to phone conversations everywhere, then we're operating no differently than a phone card type of thing."

Meickle has similar sentiments. "Convenience is part of it. It's generally harder to set up an Internet call than a telephone call. The person called must be network attached at the time of the call, etc. Quality is a factor, too. While most products have gone to duplex codecs and have improved echo cancellation, there are still network latency, capacity issues, and compression artifacts that lower the quality of calls. While products are not like 'ham radio' connections they once were, they aren't yet consistently 'toll quality' either. There is a privacy aspect as well. Most products use the multimedia capabilities of the PC and are speakerphone interfaced. Few people want to have personal conversations that are shared with their suite-mates."

Can the Net handle it?

In the end, the Internet itself may be the most limiting factor for VoIP technology, according to Pulver and others. "Fundamentally, the biggest problem is that the Internet is the world's largest testbed," he said. "If you took up a phone and called Beijing, everyone who touches that call makes money from it. Usually, just the originator and terminator make money from an IP telephony. There's no incentive for anyone to offer quality service."

Pulver points out that the Internet currently requires as five to nine hops to get from point A to point B, rather than using an optimized, static route, because of the system it is based on. "When you're looking at the delays on an Internet telephone call, it's really constrained by the time it takes the packets to arrive and whether they arrive in order or not." In theory, the Internet could have higher quality than an ordinary call. "There's no reason in a country with Internet infrastructure to transmit less then CD-quality audio."

Levine, meanwhile, says that the Internet's limitations are overcome by his software. "The key to VocalTec's software are the algorithms that do data compression to make use of current bandwidth constraints of ordinary phone lines and the open Internet," he said.

The other problem, according to Lewis, is that the technologies aren't quite up to their standards yet. Even though such technologies will both improve their own call-handling capacity (by not requiring a whole circuit for a given call) and revenue (from companies like Metricom buying the flat-rate backbone access). Lewis says that with IP telephony, there is "no concept of pin drop." Occasional packet problems will exist until an improved protocol is found, though "what you see in terms of packet loss mostly occurs at the ISP level."

The future of phones?

No matter what form the future takes, Pulver is sure that things are likely to change. "It's going to be interesting over the course of the next 3 to 5 years. It's such a neat technology—it's very seldom that you get to change something as fundamental as phones. I'm just very glad that I'm here. It excites the geek in me."

Meickle is enthusiastic as well. According to him, what may really make new technologies compelling, in addition to lower costs, may be applications that can't be foreseen. "Some examples of benefits might include improving the Web experience by adding voice to e-commerce applications, voice-based network navigation, network-based voice messaging. The real fun part is we don't know what application or service might spring up just because the technology is there," Meickle said. "The establishing of standards, the increase in processing available with digital signal processors (DSPs) and CPUs, and continuing bandwith increases in terrestrial and wirelss networks will all contribute to products and services that go far beyond the capability of the telephone or the computer alone."

In its best implementation, a user shouldn't care if their call is over IP. "The call should be easy, of high quality, and it should be inexpensive," Meickle said.

Related Sites:

LINKS WILL OPEN UP IN A NEW WINDOW

• At the Vocaltec web site, you can download Internet Phone 5, which is a trial version of a product incorporating whiteboards and other features, as well as VocalTec Internet Phone Lite, which allows free calls to phones throughout the country.
• At Pulver.com, you can find out more about IP telephony.
• Read an article about Sprint's take on the matter here.
• Find out more about Millecom at GoldCall.

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