Before the Dawn of IP Telephony - Part 6
Originality and ingenuity for establishing voice quality
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
At the end of 1996, we finally reached the stage of VoIP product shipment. The technologies that had a major impact on subsequent implementations are introduced here.
Voice communication using packets — or Internet telephony — already existed in 1996, when we developed VOICEHUB.
The Internet phone tried by some fanatics using a PC for practical use hardly lived up to its name due to poor performance. It was basically laughed at as a toy among communication carriers and vendors. The majority thought that it was hardly useful as a telephone. Negative views were especially held by Japanese domestic vendors, and there were no other vendors attempting to fully dive into voice communication using IP (VoIP).
Realizing quality that is passable as a telephone was a critical issue for convincing VoIP to the world and making the first step toward its dissemination. The drop in communication cost using VoIP was an innovative achievement and the potential for completely changing communication as we know it in the near future was very appealing. Regardless of the low cost, however, VoIP would never be accepted as a product or market if minimal quality could not be met.
Photo 1 BS1100-VOICEHUB, the first product that was completed at the end of 1996
Establishing voice quality as a telephone was the absolute-must condition when we developed our first product, "BS1100-VOICEHUB" (photo 1). BS1200 — the successor of BS1100 — that was developed next received a number of awards in the U.S. in the field of Internet telephony at the time. Our approach for establishing voice quality that has been inherited following the development of BS1100 is introduced here, along with some explanation of technical points.
Continued to next page: Basic concept of establishing voice quality...
Page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
