Hi.
I know a bit about internet telephony. Technologically, it is enabled by ubiquitous high-speed internet access (e.g. 128 kb/sec and more), improved routers, and more powerful personal computers.
IP telephony has a business advantage over regular telephony in that IP traffic is not tariffed to a fine granularity. e.g. your access rate (e.g. 128 kbits/sec) limits how much traffic you can run. Therefore IP telephone calls can be free.
Where IP telephony starts to cost is when you want to call between an IP phone and a non-IP phone. Then you must go through a gateway, and that is where they ding you for $$$. Also, if you want your IP phone to have a "real" phone number, you must pay about $5 per month to the PSTN gateway provider for the privelege. That is why most VoIP providers (e.g. Vonage) have a fairly high monthly rate, but have virtually free long distance service.
IP telephony is fantastic because it will force incumbent phone services a competitive incentive to either reduce fees, or to provide better service or better service bundles.
IP phone service also has some interesting possibilities with web service providers. There is an open-source Linux-based IP PBX called Asterisk (
www.asterisk.org) which can run a VoIP PBX. What is interesting is that you can do some cool things with it. For example, one fellow has set up a phone number service which you call. Asterisk answers the service, and asks you to type in an ISBN number for a book. Asterisk gathers the digits and calls a SOAP web service script to send a message to Amazon.com to get the price. Once received, it translates the text to speech and reads you the result.
e.g. The possibilities are vast...
Cheers, Jay
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