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Telephony software

So, now we have a hardware voice compression device, and its device driver is in place. We need a high-level piece of software that will recognize you lifting the receiver, respond with a dial tone, listen to you entering a `phone number', and try to establish a connection over Internet to the destination that you specify. Once connected, it will send/receive compressed audio packets, assemble them, buffer them to account for the latency of the network (there is no guaranteed time of delivery in the plain TCP/IP world), and play them into your ear. Quicknet calls their version of such software `Internet Switchboard (TM)', but as of this writing (March 7, 2000) it is only available for Microsoft proprietary operating system(s), and a Linux version is not yet available. But, there is Voxilla.



 

Ed Sternin edik@brocku.ca
2000-03-07