AccessMyLibrary provides FREE access to over 30 million articles from top publications available through your library.
Create a link to this page
Copy and paste this link tag into your Web page or blog:
I FIRST HEARD ABOUT INTERNET TELEPHONY BACK in 1985, when MIT professor Steven Burns told me about an "Etherphone" that some researchers at Xerox had created to send voice over a computer network. The system worked by taking a person's voice, digitizing it, breaking that digital data into packets, and finally sending those packets over a high-speed network. At the other end, another Etherphone reversed the whole process. Neat technology, I thought, but far too computationally intensive and wasteful of resources to ever be practical.
How wrong I was. In the past 18 years, computers have gotten more than 1,000 times faster and networks nearly 100 times faster, but the human voice has remained basically unchanged. As a result,…