Timed local calls

[Stewart Fist]

Dan Tebbut wrote:

>>Frank Blount has been saying that Internet traffic will exceed voice in
>2000.
>
>One US expert recently predicted that global IP traffic would exceed voice
>in 1999, a year earlier than previously expected. See
>http://www.apcmag.com/news/date.htm or APC March 1997.


Has anyone actually worked out what this means.

What measure are they using (predicting).  Minutes of contact, volume of
data, or what.

We could all put 8kb/s vocoders on our telephone handsets tomorrow and cut
the bit-volume rate of voice calls to one-eighth, using today's technology.
If we used variable vocoders, we could cut the number of voice bits by
twice this at least.

So what the hell is this supposed to mean?

And when the world has so much bandwidth that it can't use one quarter,
under peak load, on 90% of the major national and international circuits,
what is the significance anyway.

We keep treating telecommunications as if it was a technical problem
waiting technical solutions.  It is not -- and it hasn't been since the mid
1980s.

It is a political and economic problem.



Stewart Fist
Technical writer and journalist.
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