In addition to these services, Internet end users do not have to use any specific third party service but may define their own services.
4.1.2 State of development of services
Public telephony is beginning to be implemented quite widely as PC-Phone, where calls originated from a PC over the Internet are routed to a PSTN gateway for delivery to ordinary telephones. Implementation over an all IP route has not yet started. Such implementation would need either the ENUM public service to convert the called number to an Internet name, or the allocation of E.164 numbers to operators who use IP at the local level. An all IP implementation of public telephony over Internet will start in about 2 years time.
Internet named telephony is growing rapidly but on the basis of informal closed user groups. It has not yet started as a full any-any service because of two obstacles:
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The services use PC terminals at present and PCs are not normally left on for receiving incoming calls. This situation will change somewhat when ADSL becomes widely available, but it will change most when Internet telephones (dedicated computer based telephones) become a commodity item. This development is probably at least four years away because there is not yet sufficient standardisation of the terminal-network interface. Good quality standards that support interoperability between different vendors are needed to create the confidence for development and large volume production to produce attractive terminals at an affordable price.
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Although Internet names are used for identification, these names need to be resolved into IP addresses for routeing. These addresses are normally allocated dynamically for the period when a dial-up terminal is logged on. This means that a user cannot store the Internet addresses of frequent correspondents because these addresses will not remain valid.
The short term solution to the dynamic address problem offers communications between customers of the same service provider only. This is the “instant messaging” solution described earlier.
This solution is also used to provide a service known as “presence” which is very popular. Users develop their own lists of frequent contacts (buddy lists) which are stored by the service provider. Whenever a user logs-on his presence is notified to every other user that has stored his name in their buddy list. Thus a user knows who is available. The presence feature is included in most Internet named telephony services.
Internet named telephony services with presence are commonly offered as part of portals such as Yahoo and as part of “Instant Messenger” services that include a short text message capability where the message is flashed on the screen of the recipient. These services also include point-multipoint capabilities that allow groups to chat together.
Presence and chat add a new dimension to telecommunications from the user’s perspective. It changes telecommunications from being a deliberate one-one act by making the communications more spontaneous and less focused. In a domestic situation it makes communications more like people sharing the same living room and in a business situation more like sharing an open plan office. We think that this will be a very significant development.
These services are well suited to any planning activity and could therefore be used to plan criminal activities.
The long term solution to the dynamic address problem is the use of SIP proxy servers by Internet telephony service providers. Their introduction should enable Internet named telephony to develop into a general any-any service.
The previous section has considered only retail services. Both Internet and managed IP, however, are already used extensively in wholesale services for long distance/international PSTN traffic, especially to countries with relatively low traffic volumes or high accounting (termination) rates. Operators who run these service sell capacity to national carriers and shared telecom centres. Prices for this traffic vary continually in a “spot market” fashion. Regulators seem to be unaware of the extent to which these services have developed in the last two years. For example, some 50% of the voice traffic from the US to China is understood to be handled in this way. Major players17 are:
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ITXC, which uses the public Internet and has over 250 points of presence covering 60 countries. It was started by Vocal Tec and AT&T in 1997. It carried some 270m minutes in Q3 2000 (=1,080m minutes pa) with an annualised growth rate of over 120%. Its customers include most of the international carriers in the US, Cable & Wireless, Japan Telecom, Korea telecom and Telstra. ITXC actively manages quality using its own proprietary technology, and passes some 15% of its traffic back to circuit switched networks when the Internet is heavily congested.
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Genuity, which uses a managed IP network. It was started by GTE Internetworking but separated from them when GTE merged with Bell Atlantic to form Verizon. GTE provides wholesale services as well as retail services that are badged in other companies’ portals and part of the Internet backbone. In Q2 2000, its annual VoIP traffic rate was estimated to be 2,400 m minutes pa.
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iBasis, which uses the public Internet and started carrying VoIP in 1998. It has some 15-20 major telecom centres around the world and exchanges traffic through large ISPs. It claims to deliver PSTN quality by its own proprietary management and monitoring and passes less than 10% of its traffic to the PSTN during periods of congestion.
4.1.4 Related services
One of the early service applications for PCs is “Click-to-talk” where a web page offers a button to initiate a voice conversation with a call centre. The Click-to-talk button is a particular form of user interface for initiating either a public telephony or an Internet telephony call. The type of call will depend on whether E.164 numbering or Internet naming is used.
A variation of Click-to-talk would give the user the capability to select the called party so click-to-talk becomes click-to-dial. This form of service presentation is being adopted by many of the Internet Telephony Service Providers who operate through customisable web pages called portals. An example is Yahoo. This form of presentation is well suited to funding by advertising.
Another application is “Internet call waiting” where an incoming public telephony call that meets an exchange line that is engaged with an Internet access call, can be diverted to the called party’s ISP and delivered through the Internet. This is a form of call diversion that connects an incoming public telephony call in series with an Internet telephony call.
Unified messaging is an integrated service application that can combine various service elements to give users the ability to retrieve messages or stored communications (voicemail, faxmail) of various types in a variety of different ways including having the stored messages collected over the Internet. For example stored voice messages could be collected as a digital file and listened to using local decoding and replay on the user’s laptop.
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