Before the Dawn of IP Telephony - Part 17
"BAKUON GA GINSEKAI NO KOUGEN NI HIROGARU" (December 1999 ~ January 2000)
These contents translated a serialization article carried by ITPro IP telephony ONLINE published by Nikkei Business Publications, Inc. Jump to the original (Japanese).
Shinji Usuba
General Manager
eSound Venture Unit
Business Incubation Division
Systems Network Group
Oki Electric Industry Co., Ltd
We were at the final stage of line unit (LU) development. It was then discovered that the LSI, which had already entered mass production, did not perform sufficiently under certain conditions during software assessment. The situation seemed hopeless with no measures to be found.
In December 1999, LU development of OKI's IP-PBX seemed to be at a dead-end with the fatal problem of LSI signal processing capacity. Just when I was feeling like abandoning the project from absolute despair, I was stricken with an idea. I had remembered that members handling signal processing of cellular phones for the U.S. market were developing the core technology of VoIP gateway. I visited Department Manager Hasumi who was in charge of the team as if I were grasping for straws.
Photo 1 Hiromi Aoyagi, master of signal processing
After explaining the situation, Department Manager Hasumi agreed to let Hiromi Aoyagi, the core engineer in this field and his associate come to the site. Upon their arrival, they immediately picked up the receiver of the IP telephone and started to howl into it.
I'll never forget the scene. As the IP-PBX development members watched breathlessly, they shouted, "BAKUON GA GINSEKAI NO KOUGEN NI HIROGARU (*)"
(*) Japanese for "A sound roars through the highland of a snowy world."
It was a bizarre scene to say the least. They repeated the words over and over again in a volume far above what one would expect in a normal phone call-they were shouting. Although this is now common during verification in an anechoic room for VoIP related personnel, the bizarreness was beyond words for those watching the scene at the time. But at the same time, there was a strange expectation that they might just be the ones to save us from this potentially tragic situation.
Continued to next page: "Let's fiddle with the parameters"
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