Verification in a basement cafeteria

K found a location where there are no outside electrical waves and where sufficient distance can be secured. To my surprise, this ideal location was the basement cafeteria of OKI. At the time, the in-house cafeteria was located in the basement to accommodate the several thousand employees working at Shibaura, Tokyo during lunch. Although the cafeteria was used during the day, it was unused during the night. The cafeteria would surely compensate for the distance that could not be provided in the shield room. Young K made us aware that the perfect location was in fact, directly beneath our feet.

The idea was adopted immediately by securing the location, and verification for accommodating PHS on LAN started. Obviously, we were not able to use the place during the day as it operated as a cafeteria. So, we repeated the process of installing and testing the devices during the night and cleaning up during the day. Creating an environment needed for verification was time consuming and required much patience. As a result, we acquired important technical experience for accommodating PHS on LAN. I believe that this knowledge will become important for realizing rich communication in full IP and full broadband networks of the future.

Corporate VoIP completed

The full IP-PBX system was released into the market in August 2000. The accommodation of PHS realized the basic concept of guaranteeing communication regardless of the signal attribute including faxes and modems for data flowing through the network. Furthermore, the concept development announced at ISS '97 was almost finished.

The development of a corporate solution as VoIP gateway seemed to come to a rest with the accommodation of PHS in IP stage. PCs were becoming common within offices, port unit cost of LAN switches dropped drastically as we expected and the advantages of integrating infrastructures were slowly becoming known. Although this product was technically innovative, there were still a number of realistic issues remaining. Despite the understanding of the potential in the future, we needed to overcome various issues before determining a price, and specifications, and having the device used in the environments of our customers.

The shift to IP was surely happening, it was a long road before the technology was standardized as IP telephony and gained acceptance. We knew that voice IP packets would spread sooner or later by steadily evolving corporate solutions, but we believed it was something that would not happen very soon.

However, we are hit by a catastrophic event before a year had passed since the PHS accommodation in IP-PBX.