Before the Dawn of IP Telephony - Part 3
Toward product commercialization (1996)
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 developing "VOICEHUB", the first IP telephony related product, for the Communication Tokyo exhibition to be held in April 1996. Although the road was never easy, including a major modification one month prior to the exhibition, we somehow managed to take the device to the exhibition hall on the morning of first day.
Photo 1 Hiroshi Kuboki who made the first demonstration at the exhibition hall
During the four days of the exhibition, everyone who took part in the development of VOICEHUB including myself was present as demonstrators (photo 1). The response from the visitors was overwhelming. All of the development members must have felt they had come onto something big.
Many of the visitors interested in the device had advanced awareness and expressed their feelings strongly including the innovation of inhouse networks. At the end of the exhibition, members involved in the development celebrated with a quiet toast among themselves.
Response toward commercialization
Fig.1 Example of a network using VOICEHUB
Although the network was not exactly as shown in the diagram, the configuration was very similar.
Actually, there was a business inquiry from a certain international system integrator concerning the procurement of various network devices two months prior to the exhibition. They wanted to build a large-scale network of voice and data that would cover hundreds of bases nationwide (Fig. 1). At the time, it was common to separate the flow of voice and data. There were no products that could integrate voice with data over an IP network.
Continued to next page: VOICEHUB adopted for use in network...
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