IP telephony: Why wait?

The other day I had one of those living-in-the-future moments. An important phone call came in, but the colleague I needed to bring into the call wasn't available, and the caller couldn't wait. So, with the caller's permission, I recorded the call and forwarded it as an MP3 file to my colleague. When she later replayed the conversation, she got crucial points -- both factual and emotional -- that I never could have accurately reported.

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VoIP fantasy come true? Not even close. The call came in on a POTS line. I answered on a regular -- not even cordless -- telephone. The integration between the voice and data networks was courtesy of JK Audio's QuickTap, a little gadget that sits between the phone's handset and its base. It adjusts the levels of both sides of the conversation and delivers the resulting mix through an audio-out jack.

There's nothing futuristic about this call store-and-forward feature I cobbled together. I could have done the same thing a decade ago. Ironically, 1994 was the year in which Byte Magazine's computer telephony cover story -- which I wrote -- proclaimed that integrated voice/data applications were right around the corner. Here we are in 2004, and they're still right around the corner. What went wrong?

In the prevailing mythology, this is a Darwinian struggle between the Bellheads and the Netheads (infoworld.com/1992). The Bellheads are the hulking dinosaurs who built a smart network, the PSTN, hooked dumb devices to it, and controlled the services. The Netheads are the agile mammals who scurry around attaching smart devices to a dumb network -- the Internet -- and liberating the services. Put it that way, and we all know how the story turns out. But the Netheads (myself included) spend way too much time basking in smug self-congratulation. Of course, the dumb network will win out in the end. But if we make every new telephony application or feature contingent on that victory, we'll still be waiting a decade from now.

Of course, I'm having as much fun with this year's VoIP vogue -- Skype -- as I know many of you are. It's great to make free (and encrypted) long-distance phone calls using a Wi-Fi-connected laptop and a USB headset -- just like it was great last year to do the same kind of thing with iChat AV or with various predecessors dating back to the mid-1990s.

Every time one of these solutions comes along, I give it a try. And every time so far, including Skype, the novelty soon fades. It's really, really hard to match the quality and consistent reliability of a nailed-up circuit. We'll get there eventually, I'm sure. But why must everything depend on beating the dinosaurs at their own game? There are dozens of ways in which personal computers can add value to the PSTN. Caller ID screen pops, conference call setup, call logging, voice archiving, and user-programmable IVR (interactive voice response) are just some of the productivity aids that we should all take for granted by now -- but that almost nobody can.

The story of the Bellheads vs. the Netheads is a myth in the primary sense of that word. It explains a real conflict between worldviews in a way most people can easily understand, and that's useful. But we can't believe it literally. If the mammals keep waiting for the dinosaurs to die out, we'll keep missing chances to exploit them.