Phone calls from space, or through your fridge, are possible through a new telephone technology, writes David Shapshak
Making history as an astronaut seems par for the course, but American astronaut Marsha Ivins took a giant leap for mankind earlier this year by making the first phone call in space.
In February Ivins had a brief phone call from a space shuttle to earth using technology that can turn any device that can link to the Internet into a telephone.
It uses Internet Protocol (IP), the computer protocol that lets computers talk to each other across the chasm of geography using the wires that make up the Internet; and which governs how information is sent by one computer in a format that can be received and utilised by another.
All machines have a unique IP address that identifies them to the global network of computers. Such specific identification has many benefits, as does the standardisation of the protocol that connects them. Therefore, if any device is IP-enabled, it can be used to conduct voice traffic a conversation as easily as it transports the data of Web pages or e-mail.
Voice-over Internet Protocol (VoIP) has been around for a few years but is rapidly maturing to the extent that it can be used over the burgeoning wireless networks and from an orbiting space ship. The technology involved in Ivins’s phone call was precedent-setting requiring all sorts of tweaks to maintain a 144 800km phone call from the shuttle to Nasa in Houston and could revolutionise the way we communicate.
But VoIP has been thrust into the spotlight recently because of pending legislation that will severely limit its use by the private sector as fears mount that it will steal revenue from Telkom. Why, for instance, should a computer user in South Africa pay for an international phone call at international rates if they want to contact another computer user in the United States, when both of them could simply pay for a local call at local rates by speaking through their computers?
Computers are obviously an essential part of the equation, says Tim Ellis, director of enterprise at Cisco Systems sub-Saharan Africa. Cisco not only makes the routers and switches that connect about 75% of the world’s Internet infrastructure, but also makes a software package, SoftPhone, to run VoIP which Ivins used in her historic call.
However, a range of other devices are becoming IP-enabled. “If any IP device be it a PC, or a PDA [personal digital assistant] like an iPaq is IP-enabled, you can have a conversation using them,” says Ellis.
Pilot trials have been done using such hand-held computers over wireless networks common in corporate environments or public facilities such as airports, like protocols 802.11b and Bluetooth.
“The [data] carrier is irrelevant as long as you are using one standard protocol,” says Ellis. “It could run over a piece of barbed wire.”
There are many more benefits of using VoIP, especially being able to piggyback voice traffic over the same vast infrastructure created in the late 1990s for the data-intensive Internet.
There is already one global “common infrastructure supporting data, voice and video, all over one and the same platform, using IP,” says Ellis.
For a large corporate firm, it is even more attractive as it can use its network for both computer connections and for the telephone system.
“They need only wire once with an Ethernet, and everything connects to that infrastructure. That’s a big saving if you have to move into a large campus environment. As everything has an IP address, you only need one skill set to maintain the infrastructure. That gives you lots of flexibility,” says Ellis. Additionally, “their PABX now becomes a server and once it is sitting on a server, you can integrate other applications”.
In both corporate environments and the world at large “the idea is do away with traditional handsets. Your phone could potentially ring on your PC: up will pop a little screen that looks like a telephone and you can take, or make, calls. Which is nice wherever you connect to the Internet, you now have a telephone connection,” says Ellis.
Considering there are a range of Internet-enabled devices that are slowly making their way into the home including an Internet fridge from LG it puts the traditional phone model under some pressure. Imagine, you could be answering your portable fridge phone in a few years.
A PDA phone can use both the cellular GSM infrastructure and the normal dial-up method to convert itself into such a VoIP phone. “That’s where it’s going. For us it’s the big drive, to do away with analogue phones, even digital phones for IP phones,” says Ellis.
After all, if you connect to the Internet at local calls and VoIP can give you similar voice quality, why would you ever want to pay for a long-distance call again?
It is for this reason that VoIP has been in the spotlight in the past two weeks after stark recommendations in the Telecommunications Amendment Bill that limit its use to Telkom, the proposed second fixed-line operator and a few other firms operating ostensibly beyond the telco’s reach in low-teledensity areas.
Telecoms operators are terrified about the prospects of revenue loss through this cheaper, if not slightly more complicated, system. The Bill makes VoIP a function of Telkom so that it makes it more attractive to the other party. The value-added operators are clearly upset for good reason.
The South African Value Added Network Service Association (Sava) last week went so far as to say the constitutionality of the Bill may be challenged should it be pushed through. They were at pains to point out that the Bill “ignores the consultative process that preceded it and that it is totally out of step with industry and South African needs”.
Sava chairperson Mike van den Bergh was joined by Edwin Thompson, co-chairperson of the Internet Service Providers Association, in stressing that the government had ignored the recommendations of its own regulator, the Independent Communications Authority of South Africa.
In a written submission to Parliament Sava argues that it is aware of “conflicting policy positions of the government”, that “it is necessary to create a regulatory environment so the initial public offering for Telkom will yield maximum benefits for South Africa”, but that “at the same time it is important that a clear and stable regulatory environment be created to encourage competition and thus access to universal service to communications”.
“The Vans [value-added network services] industry believes that the Bill will not achieve either of these goals and only benefit individual entities in the Vans and ISP industry (notably Telkom) to the detriment of the industry as a whole, and ultimately South Africa,” the statement read.
Telkom is not renowned for doing their job particularly well and now the Bill will cut into the private sector that is quite rightly enamoured by VoIP.
Currently, a company with offices around the country linked by a network known as a Virtual Private Network (VPN) can make VoIP calls. But this is not allowed where they start breaking out of VPN because it affects Telkom’s revenue.
However, forestalling technology is hardly the way to combat such advances, as many international carriers have become aware of.
It demonstrates two mindsets: legislate to protect revenue and market share or innovate to gain them. And, in the increasingly global marketplace, the legislative and protective path is out of synch with international practise. “The rest of the world has accepted that,” says Ellis. “We’re at a stage now where we need to innovate or be relegated to Third World status indefinitely.”
Analysts point out that trying to give Telkom more protection is hardly likely to make them a better company, as the less than massive turnover in the five years of exclusivity has shown.
It is also easy to see how users could bypass the Telkom system and do all their work through an ISP, although the latter would still use Telkom infrastructure.
Sticking our heads in the sand by limiting the use of VoIP is not going to solve the problem. Sava has stressed that the Amendment Bill comes “at a crucial time for the long-term development of the telecommunications industry, especially in the light of Telkom’s upcoming initial public offering. The proposed legislation had surprised most observers and has been formulated in stark contrast to the newly implemented process of liberalisation.”
Asked whether VoIP is the next big thing in telecommunications, Ellis says: “Without doubt. It is something we are extremely focused on. From a revenue point of view people are migrating from traditional environments to VoIP environments.”