Voice on the Net

Q. Dr Paul - I am a distance learning expert worried about the cost of running audio-conferences. I keep reading in articles that I can get voice service over the Internet now. Should I change my audio-conferencing system to the Internet? Worried of Wisconsin.

A.Dear Worried - It is nice to see some of our North American readers asking questions. And this is a tough one.

True, many developers of Internet software have added voice features to their Internet software. There are at least 28 pieces of software for Mac or PC (and even a few for Unix) that allow you to talk and listen to other people over the Internet - provided that you have the necessary microphone, speaker and sound cards plugged into your microcomputer; and your microcomputer is fairly powerful.

Until recently, the companies developing these could be dismissed as small (or tiny) but now that Netscape and Microsoft have joined the fray, with mainstream offerings, it is hard to ignore.

It’s best to divide your question into two parts. First, let’s suppose that all the students on your courses are on the Internet. They have also got to have reasonable microcomputers with sound capability, and a fast Internet connection (28.8 kbit/s modem or better if you want to get reasonable quality). I know that this is all very unlikely at present, especially with the traditional rural audiences for audio-conferencing, but it helps to start with this viewpoint.

Then the question is: Will these students use Voice on the Net software rather than using the phone? But the big part of this question is not technical at all - it is "who’s paying?" If you are paying for their calls, for example if you run an audio-conferencing bridge which dials out to them, then they have no incentive to change; unless you withdraw that service.

So let’s further suppose that they are using to paying. Well, it will certainly be cheaper for them to use the Internet which typically charges users a flat fee per month, rather than make a long-distance telephone call. But if it is just a local call, then it is not worth the hassle. So let’s further suppose the students all have to make long-distance calls to your bridge. Then if (and it’s a big "if" for rural users) there is an Internet node within local call range, they may consider using that instead. In that case it comes down to the quality of the service.

Well, things have moved on from the time when Voice on the Net was a bit like the crystal set era of steam radio or a military radio system in the last War. There are now full-duplex Voice on the Net systems (if your audio hardware is up to it), thus avoiding the old "press to speak" problems which ruin the dynamics of a conversation. The sound quality is not that great - maybe rather like mobile phones - and so by comparison with corporate voice networks or ISDN (or even the latest analogue networks linked by digital switches and trunks) the quality is poorer. So probably it comes down to motivation and ease of use.

There is a further problem. At present most of the Voice on the Net systems are geared to one-to-one telephone calls, not to audio-conferencing. Unless you are really desperate to continue to use audio-conferencing (and I know several audio-conferencing old-timers who cannot see beyond audio-conferencing, or audio-graphics at best), why not re-engineer your course to make more use of computer conferencing (after all, you are working on the assumption that your users have microcomputers and Internet access), filled in with one-to-one telephone calls?

This makes it far easier also to integrate with users who are not on the Internet. So I’ll turn to this issue now. In the prehistoric days of Voice on the Net (last year), there was no capability of linking such users to the public telephone network. Since then, several projects have taken this issue on board, although whether any of them could be called a "plug and play service", I’ll leave you to judge. Also, geographical coverage is likely to be a problem, especially outside North America.

What your Voice on the Net student user on the Internet wants is to use her microcomputer to call anyone else in the world - like her tutor or another student; or, of course, her friends and relations (at your expense, ideally) - and for "the system" to work out the "least cost" way of reaching that other user, whether by calling over the Internet (if the remote user is on the Internet with compatible capability) or (in most cases at present), calling over the Internet to a point near that remote user and then routing the call over the public telephone network. Simple, no? Well, not really. Note that we do not even have anything like that for electronic and postal mail, despite decades of development. Secondly, there are major technical problems of incompatibility between the various different Voice on the Net systems (and between them and the public telephone network). Third, there is the dread spectre of "bypass".

You see, what your student is doing is bypassing the right (which some companies think is absolute) to charge her as much as they can for handling her call. They will be even more irritated if government money (like to your institution) has been used to help her bypass their fees.

Several of the US telcos were so incensed that in March 1996 they set up the "America’s Carriers Telecommunications Association (ACTA)" to lobby the FCC to strangle Voice on the Net at birth. So far, they are not succeeding - partly because a vigorous counter-lobby (in the best US tradition) - the "VON (Voice on the Net) Coalition" - rapidly got set up, and recently persuaded some big players like Microsoft to join; and also because several of the large US telcos decided not to join ACTA, for reasons at which one can only speculate unless one looks at the web (no, not that kind of Web) of dependency relationships between big telcos and big software companies. (In fact, recently Sprint even joined the VON Coalition!)

Recent snippets suggest that the "Computing" lobby have so far out-gunned the "telco" lobby. The Chairman of the FCC said recently "I’m against subjecting Internet telephony to the old rules that apply to conventional circuit-switched voice carriers, even while we’re trying to change those rules."

The technical issues of interoperability between Voice on the Net and the public telephone network are being addressed by the "Internet Telephony Consortium", based at MIT. Actual reliable products and viable services are thin on the ground, as opposed to beta products and best-efforts trials; but this is expected to change soon.

Notice that whether or not viable Voice on the Net services emerge, this is one of the pressures on phone companies to drastically reduce their long-distance tariffs and possibly move them away from time-based tariffing altogether. Recent press comments make it clear that the long-distance sector is under attack from various quarters: international call-back operators, systems integrators, cable TV companies, and, in a small way, Internet telephony services. The last attack is in my view the most insidious, not because of its market share (which is tiny) but because of the conceptual shift it forces on customers: Internet customers are not used to, and do not like, time-based tariffs. Any reduction in these tariffs affects us all beneficially, whether or not we use Voice on the Net.

Confused? So are we all! So let me distil the Voice on the Net issue down to simple terms for distance educators.

If you are putting on a widespread course, perhaps even a Global Course, oriented to wealthy, Internet-aware students in major cities in the western world, Voice on the Net software could be a very good way of getting live interaction into your system, to augment the worthy but asynchronous elements of computer conferencing and WWW resources. But while you are at it, why not add some audio broadcasting in as well, such as Real Audio? If your potential users can handle Voice on the Net, they certainly have the capability of doing RealAudio (or one of its clones).

If your potential students are not of that sort, be much more careful.

Finally, I have to say that the end of the era of traditional analogue-based audio-conferencing is drawing nigh. (Speaking personally, I loved it and cut my systems teeth on it in the 1970s.) Those universities, and departments in universities (like so many Distance Teaching Units in the US), who are wedded to that technology may find themselves bypassed, not just by newer technology (whether Voice on the Net or not) but also by newer paradigms and other forces within their own or rival institutions.

Further reading

Jeff Pulver, who runs the VON Coalition, has done a superb job in bringing together all the information both on technology and lobbying. Surf to: http://www.von.org for the entry point to a cornucopia of material. For material relating to technical aspects, surf to the sister site: http://www.von.com.

Mass-market vendors offering Voice on the Net products include:

If you are particularly interested in multi-way chats, start with a look at Netscape’s CoolTalk, Microsoft’s NetMeeting and the Internet Party Line product.

Other useful sites are rare. The two main contenders are:

  1. TechKnow Times "Audio and Video on the Internet" by Jack Decker - see: http://www.novagate.com/~jack/audiovid.html.

  2. the "Internet Telephony Page" by Andrew Sears of MIT’s group who study regulatory and related issues of the Internet: http://rpcp.mit.edu/~asears/main.html.

There is also the VON Coalition listserver which will give you a daily message feed. Send email to: majordomo@pulver.com with the following line in the message body: subscribe von-digest.

Several Usenet Newsgroups carry relevant material, including: alt.winsock.voice and comp.sys.mac.comm.

These two newsgroups and some others carry regular updates of the Andrew Sears "Voice FAQ" which is on his area on WWW at: http://rpcp.mit.edu/~asears/voice-faq.html.

Issue 10 "Learning in a Global Information Society" 2 September 1996