Freelance
News Service
The Future of Telecom
By William Cracraft
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At the consumer level, techno-futurists predict we’ll be making video calls from a PC with enclosed phone and video communication systems, e-mail will be available by voice phone and voice messages will be printed or read out by lap or desktop computers.
At the atomic level, one company is looking at changing from an electronic to a photonic switching system. According to Sandy Hill, marketing vice president for Voice Pro of San Ramon, the telecommunication industry is rounding a corner.
"It’s the second wave of technology that’s coming at us and while I think every business needs to have telephones and communications, it’ll take on a different flavor, that flavor will be a lot more systems or pieces of systems being on the local area network or the wide area network," said Hill.
The company provides telephone systems, voice mail and something called CTI, computer telephony integration, allowing users to view voice mail messages on computer screens. It also builds call centers for telephone sales or help desk departments. A common change predicted by some techno futurists is the integration of telephone and computer to one unit. Hiill doesn’t see that change as generally viable though.
"There are a couple of fundamental problems with saying everybody is going to use their PC as their telephone," she said. The combined computer/telephone "might be good in a call center where all you do all day is take calls and orders, like an order desk or a help desk. Those companies are in the business of being on the phone and computer at the same time. You stick a headset into your computer and away you go.
"If it’s you and me, Joe Average Business Person, the telephone is sort of the ubiquitous interface. No matter where you go in the world, you know what a telephone is and you pick it up and you punch the buttons on it or dial the dial, heaven forbid, but you know how to make a phone call. The user interface is internationally similar enough that you could actually do it," Hill added.
Two basic barriers to computers supplanting phones are, "number one, most people don’t carry their computers with them although you see a few people doing that, and number two, there’s not a computer on every street corner. Your still going to have to have a telephone. I still understand it as my business interface and it still the most reliable piece of business equipment on the market today," she said.
What Hill sees as the next level of technology is the refining of connections until we have a seamless net made up selected options. "Already I have some choices. When I check my voice mail for example, I can check it from any touch tone telephone in the world. When I’m at my desk top or when I have my laptop hooked up I can check my voice mail in a visual mode and see whats in my mail box. And I can check my e-mail in the same way.
"That’s merging now into a unified platform where e-mail and voice mail are in the same platform. Voice and data are absolutely converging," she said. One of those convergence points is in converting a voice mail message to text and posting it to a center where it can be retrieved as print or voice. Conversely, technology will allow your computer to read your e-mail to you one day.
"The people at MIT would say, ‘we’ve done that for ten years,’ but the people like you and me who are trying to apply it are saying ‘this is really hard, its really expensive, it make mistakes.’ It’s not error free yet," she said.
We have the technology to make those things happen and the systems can be pretty accurate. But "when did you win the lottery to buy that system, and is your house big enough for that size of a server? It still a bleeding-edge technology. It’s little rough yet," Hill said.
One component being added to the computerization of offices is PC-based PBX systems, telephone switchboards for big organizations. The past problem has been the unfortunate tendency of computers to crash once in a while. "Your computer has about an eighty percent-plus reliability rate. When it crashes it’s pretty frustrating and we can’t run a piece of our business, but we’re not dead in the water," because the regular telephone system, with a 99 percent reliability still allows the company to function.
With improved reliability in PCs. "I think that enough companies are getting stable enough" in terms of minimal computer crashes to switch to PC-based telephone control, said Hill. Tony Tissot of Siemans Business Communications Systems in Santa Clara agrees the new wave is better connection throughout. "If I want to e-mail you something that is important you should be able to be beeped or have your wireless called and have your e-mail read to you by a machine voice," he said. Such a system has always needed a person in the middle somewhere.
"We’re finding ways to do it electronically but it still at its very early stages. We can do anything, its just a matter of cost. There’s the rub," he said. A fully integrated system is "very revolutionary to us, but it doesn’t play well to the public, it’s more of an infrastructure sort of thing. Again we want to keep the model of a phone being somewhat similar. You want to pick it up and always have it work," Tissot said. The telephone has something unique in its commonness.
"If you look at the telephone, its the most ubiquitous device, there are what 600 million of them around the globe and each one of them is connectable to the other. That certainly isn’t true in the computer area. Computers tend to be for the demographically elite and they’re certainly not all connected together," said Tissot. Despite vaunted technology its still difficult to network or do new things.
"If you try to do a video conference with a friend at the other side of the country it very often doesn’t work. But you can play around at that stuff and you can play at doing phone calls across the Internet (which is at) a very early stage of the development. We think its going to get easier because we’re going to bring our kind of work ethic into it. Another area of exploration is photonic switching. "Instead of switching electrons at some point we’ll be switching photons. When people say we’re at the end of innovation, I swear, there’s always something else that will happen," Tissot said.