INTERVIEW:
Question 1
Will voice traffic break the Internet?
Answer
I think voice traffic would have broken the Internet of ten years ago, and
significant voice traffic would break the Internet as it exists today. But will voice
traffic break the Internet as it is evolving? The answer is no.
Question 2
How many telephone users exist now and how many will there be in the future?
Answer
When we did some research early this year there were about 15,000 phone users registered
with a variety of servers. Typically, at that time to make an Internet phone call a user
had to call over the Internet a specific server, select another user and then that server
would create the connection to the other user who would had to be equipped with the same
software and so on. So there was quite a low number of Internet phone users. What has
changed now in the last couple of months is that what was a wide variety of different
Internet voice solutions is quickly becoming standardised by market forces, such as the
inclusion of a variety of voice codex in products like Navigator, Navigator 3. But in
addition to that, one very exciting development that is happening is that in order to make
telephone calls over the Internet it is not necessary anymore to have a computer with
specific software, but it becomes possible to use any type of telephone. Phone up a
gateway, the gateway becomes the gateway into the Internet that reaches another gateway at
the other side of the Internet, where the call is again being translated into the standard
phone format, and voice -to-voice calls are being made. There are already commercial
operations in place. For example, in Canada there's a company called Alphanet that has
contracts and understandings with some of the major Internet providers in the US to give
them access directly into the Internet backbone and who basically sell telephone service
at a lower cost. We also know that there are a lot of activities underway to start
creating telephone networks, for example for specific native communities resident in the
USA. I'm personally aware of an effort to create an Internet phone service for the Korean
community that allows people to make calls to their relatives in Korea from New York,
obviously paying only a very small fraction of the cost of a standard voice call. But it's
not just for low budget calls. There is more and more interest in finding an ability where
fax traffic, which in essence is telephone traffic, is brought to such a gateway, the data
is extracted, the data is shipped as data over the Internet and at the other end is being
put together again into a format that is sent over the local PBX, so a fax is regenerated
in another fax machine. And here the "typical" negatives of voice over the
Internet such as long delays don't matter at all because whether a fax arrives a
millisecond later than over a standard telephone network nobody really knows. So there's
more and more of these applications of voice over the Internet happening. In particular,
it's happening very fast over the Intranet. That means Internets within a company. Because
within a company the bandwidths can be controlled, within a company bandwidths can be
guaranteed for certain protocols, for certain applications and voice over the Intranet
becomes a very powerful tool to save costs, particularly doing transatlantic or
transpacific business.
Question 3
Are there any forecasts of when this will happen?
Answer
It's happening now. And what is happening now is de facto with any one of
the 600 million telephone sets today you can make voice calls over the Internet. This is
technically not an issue anymore. How many people are actually doing it is obviously much
more difficult to fathom. But the availability of voice capability on a widely distributed
product like Navigator has now driven the number of Internet phone users into the many
100,000s. And the type of services where you make Internet phone calls from a standard
telephone set is still in it's infancy, but the interest for this type of capability is
incredible. For example, I'm also associated with a company that's an affiliated company
of Newbridge called Vienna Systems and Vienna Systems introduced just such a gateway to
the public at a show in Atlanta this fall and was awarded the best new Internet product
award of the whole show. So there is tremendous excitement building up for a very, very
simple reason and that is, you get telephone calls at significantly lower costs.
Question 4
What will be the evolution of network data?
Answer
I think that everything that one sees at industry conferences or in the financial results
of companies that provide the equipment or services to the market all points to the fact
that the Internet data traffic is growing at an exponential rate. The only question is
what is the exponential rate? Some people say it only doubles every year. Many telephone
companies reported that the traffic on the Internet grows ten to twenty percent per month,
so it is an incredible phase that the network is undergoing and obviously capacities are
added at every link, at every stage. But the important thing to remember is that at this
conference a point was made that I think should be re-emphasised. Traditionally, we are
used to a network that was designed for telephony traffic and measures have been made to
have data travel over the telephone network and the fax machine is nothing but that. It
basically emulates human speech to be transported over the network. A modem is very much
so. It makes a computer use the same frequencies that I'm using talking to you. What the
Internet will do is it will become the base network and voice and video—we haven't
even talked about video—will very much become an application very similar to a file
transfer protocol or a simple mail transfer protocol or any of the browser protocols. It's
just another application that will run on the network, but deep in the core is a data
network and voice and video will become data just like anything else.
Question 5
Which period is Internet in? The first or the second?
Answer
Actually, I don't think that the Internet can be as easily positioned into a first
Internet, a second Internet. I think there's some reference to the first and the second
period of office of Mr. Clinton. Technically, the Internet has over the last twenty years
undergone a very evolutionary change. You asked me before whether voice traffic would
break the Internet. If you had asked the question twenty years ago, it would not have
worked. It's as simple as that. If you had asked ten years ago, any significant use would
have broken it. Even today. If, for example, ten to twenty percent of the telephone users
used the Internet for telephone calls, today's Internet will break down. However, the
Internet over time has evolved into a network that has been able to handle bigger and
bigger challenges, and this evolutionary change will continue. There will be sometimes
more significant changes, such as the change in the number of possible addresses in the
Internet, that is undergoing a tremendous increase with a new variety of the language that
is being talked on the Internet. But I don't think it is very easy to say, OK, this is
period one, period two, period three. I think it's more actually described from an
application point of view. I would characterise the first period as the period when the
Internet was used for military purposes, because we should not forget that the Internet
was designed as a network that was capable to survive a nuclear strike. And clearly that
was the original thing of phase one. Phase two was that the Internet was used by the
academic community to exchange scientific research, etcetera. Phase three, where we are
now at the commercialisation of the Internet, and phase four is basically when Internet is
going to replace the telephone network as the generic network that everybody will be
connected to.
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