Telexpo News - August 25, 2005

Real-Time Internet hits Telexpo VoIP 2005

The Real-Time Internet will alter our perception of geographic distance and transform the US$1.5 trillion a year global telecommunications market, with the broad availability of natural, multimedia communications with up to dozens of participants, according to John Callon, President of the CloudMeeting video conferencing and business collaboration service.

Callon outlined his views at a morning presentation to an audience of IT and communications professionals at the annual Telexpo VoIP event, held this year in Sao Paulo, Brazil.

Software, not hardware

Callon explained that the Real-Time Internet, which he termed a fourth tidal wave in the Internet's transformation of society", follows the initial Internet wave of asynchronous communications communications not in real-time, like e-mail, bulletin boards, and file exchange and the following waves set off by the arrival of the World Wide Web in 1996, currently in the process of revolutionizing information distribution and commerce.

Showing photos of different but functionally similar models of telephones from different centuries, Callon explained that the concept of distance communication evolved little during more than 100 years, for various motives: monopoly market control, constrictive regulation, glacial evolution of standards, the financial weight of massive infrastructure, and the implemention of telephony systems principally in hardware.

The arrival of IP networks and the relatively quick and flexible implementation of new services in software, not hardware, has created conditions for radical and rapid change in distance communications.

EVOIP: Everything over IP

It's natural that with any new technology, the first application is a simple substitution of what we already know an established, conventional service, in a familiar form, but by a more efficient means," he stated.

With time will come the recognition that transforming the cost structure of voice telephony service, while exciting and important, is just the beginning of the communications revolution under way. More interesting will be the additional capabilities people will gain with everything over IP."

While 19th century telephone technology closed the distance gap, at the same time it carried an inherent limitation people began communicating by only hearing a disembodied voice. We are all conditioned to think that it's normal to talk into a plastic form and not see the other person or be able to show them things. Now we have the basic infrastructure IP networks and software to make technology conform to the capacities of human communication, and not the other way around."

Bell Labs first demonstrated a one-way picturephone in 1927, with Herbert Hoover present, but it took ATT another 30 years to test two-way video, and the company subsequently made a short-lived commercial attempt to offer a product in the early 1970s. But perhaps no single person popularized the idea of video communications as much as the Jetsons in the eponymous 1960s cartoon series, claimed Callon.

He argued however that "the kind of communications now possible are not limited to the idea of a telephone with pictures, but the door is finally opening to an age of rich, spontaneous and natural communication, integrating real-time voice, video, text, and document sharing in fixed and mobile applications, with as many participants as you like on the fly."

Total Communication

Callon gave examples of services which have appeared in recent years which offer desktop sharing and document presentation capabilities, linked to traditional PSTN voice calls and audioconferencing services, which he said demonstrate the latent demand for richer communications. At the same time, he termed such services transitional, because they do not fully exploit the opportunity for real "total communication" integrating "everything over IP".

"If I am sitting in front of a computer screen, with an internet connection, why am I just talking? Or why am I just transferring bits and bytes of Powerpoint slides, while talking on the phone?," he questioned.

CloudMeeting's service platform uses a suite of integrated software technologies, several with patents pending in the U.S., to allow users on connections as low as 56 Kbps to participate in video conferences.

Within 10 years, business people will be trying to remember how they ever managed in a globalized economy when they couldn't just click or push a button or give a voice command and see the person or the various persons with whom they wanted to communicate. Just talking will seem quaint and limiting. Which it is.