Making your voice heard on the net

When Debbie Harry sang "I had to interrupt and stop this conversation/Your voice across the line gives me a strange sensation", it's likely she was shaking after seeing her most recent telephone bill.

But this may be set to change with European software developer PC2Call launching a new cheap rate service to customers wanting to make phone calls over the internet using their PC. US rivals HearMe and Go2Call are also due to unveil their own equivalent PC based internet phone services later this year.

But are such organisations about to sign the death warrant for traditional telephone companies? Neil Spencer-Jones, managing consultant for NCC Services, the trading offshoot of the National Computer Council, believes it is still too early to write off the traditional telephone.

"The problem that PC internet technology has, is that it has got to compete in the market against something that costs about £6 from Argos, which you connect to a socket in the wall and it works. That's why we have 99.9 per cent availability and it has reasonable quality. Whether you are in the UK or Africa, you've got this push button plastic thing that works," he said.

Hanging on the telephone
Standard telephone hardware is cheap. And what is more, while IP software companies are banking on big clunky PC hardware, telephone handsets are literally becoming more mobile and user friendly. Even the recent warning that mobiles might fry consumers' brains has not persuaded them away from the sheer tactile pleasure of the cordless phone.

Nonetheless, surely cheaper call charges are likely to melt the Great British public's scepticism about the internet? Not really, because as Spencer-Jones points out, players in the telephony market are fighting a fiercely competitive war that is already driving standard telephone charges down. Income from fixed-line phones is likely to dwindle, with some analysts predicting that over the next five years, the international direct dial sector will be worth 75 per cent less than today in revenue terms.

"Phone calls are already pretty cheap. You've already seen that, while BT's rate to America was 25p to 26p, with a BT Together type thing it is now only a couple of pence. The economies can be made partly because people can buy big chunks of internet type bandwidth or IP based bandwidth and run a lot of phone conversations down it," he explained.

"Yes, this new technology is there. And yes, it will erode income from traditional phone calls, and that's why suppliers like BT are getting into lots of other services around telephony. Pure telephony is going to get cheaper," he added.

So even though companies like BT are repositioning themselves, vendors such as HearMe, Go2Call and PC2C are likely to have an impact on the bread-and-butter income sources of traditional telcos. BT claims its executives are not lying awake at night, sweating over the new voice software, however.

"Voice over IP (VoIP) is something that BT is extremely prominent in," said a BT spokesman. "We have the world's first carrier grade countrywide VoIP network in Spain, for example. It's the world's first. We have done it from an absolute clean sheet, an all-managed IP network."

"It is not how you would do it starting with pieces of the internet. We are not using the internet, we are just using IP. Most of the effects of VoIP will not cut into PSDN traffic any more than mobile has cut into PSDN. It's just created a bigger market. And we have been selling VoIP's to the corporate market for the last couple of years," he added.

On the case
But while it appears that BT is already on the case, it argues that using VoIP software simply for phone calls is a waste of time.

"To use it for just point-to-point voice calls is a waste of it. The real advantage of it is when you integrate it with other internet applications. We know that four out of five web transactions in ecommerce land are failing because customers need more information, or they are confused, or they don't understand what's going on," said the BT spokesman.

"But if you have an IP enabled call centre, and your customer gets to a certain point and they don't know what to do, they hit a button on the screen that says 'need help click here' and you are immediately connected by a voice connection to somebody who can explain to you what's going on," he added.

Such an argument would appear to be backed up by HearMe, which declined to pitch itself as a company offering cheap rate calls when it launched its multimedia, multi-million dollar advertising campaign in the US more than a month ago.

Its TV ads portrayed monks in a monastery whose vow of silence is broken after they're exposed to a laptop running the company's live voice software. The message appears to be that live voice makes the net more 'human', which correlates with BT's view that the development of ecommerce is being hampered by a lack of human interaction. But the ad also pitched the idea that voice software will change the web experience in the same way that 'talkies' changed the movies.

For the moment, anyway, the fact that the internet is still based on IPv4 means that using voice software for telephone calls demands a certain degree of patience from users. As the BT spokesman said: "In the commercial space, VoIP over the public internet is ropy. IP is not fundamentally good for real-time communications because the essence of IP networks is that the stuff comes in bunches and is load dependent."

This explains why users only receive half of a RealAudio broadcast, for example, if there is a lot of traffic. But if and when IPv6 becomes universal, calls may be less ropy because the protocol would enable an entire stream to be sent through at half the expected quality rather than as now, cutting a whole broadcast in half.

While industry observers agree that VoIP software is now mature, the limitations of the internet itself and current desktop technology mean its appeal as a cheap vehicle for phone calls is limited. As an application, however, it may completely change the way we think about the web and what we do with it.