A Short History of VoIP

In early 1997, David Tucker and Richard Platt were running a division of Intecom called Incite. They were developing and promoting an innovative product designed to optimize the use of video on corporate networks, using a backbone of isoEthernet. I spent some time contracting for Incite, and believe me, in 1997 it was pretty cool to be able to watch four channels of broadcast TV on a PC. But the technology that made this possible, isoEthernet, was also the weakness of the Incite solution. Interface cards were expensive, and isoEthernet wasn’t compatible with emerging Fast Ethernet standards.

David Tucker

This could have been the end of the story, one that is played out daily in technology companies - a bet that didn’t pay off. But instead, a couple of remarkable things happened. First, Richard and David sat down and decided that their existing call processing software and engineering expertise could take a U-turn and instead produce a Voice PBX that ran over the network - all signaling and media would travel over the corporate network instead of using a separate wiring system. The software that had been routing multimedia traffic over isoEthernet would have to now route voice calls over IP, and a complete set of apps and hardware would be needed to complete the effort.
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You’ve probably heard a bit in the past few days about how Microsoft is increasing their presence in the VoIP biz. (By the way, since VoIP is clearly and acronym, why don’t we get to capitalize the ‘o’?) (And lets stop this tendency to pronounce it as a word “voip”, it’s V-O-I-P folks.) So maybe it’s not related, but coincidental with this news is the publication of a white paper on their RT Audio Codec.

This codec is clearly designed to operate in a network (as opposed to circuit switched) environment, with lots of provisions for latency, variable bandwidth, FEC, and so on. I have a feeling that if you are making calls across Microsoft’s new phone system you’re going to be using this guy to transport your voice. Of course, when you go out to the PSTN, it’s going to require dropping down to G.711 or some other standard - which always galls Microsoft, because in some cases it’s going to mean paying royalties.

This suband coder is not just Microsoft’s, you’re free to fork out $US 50K to get a development kit and a use license for your product. Which probably means you need it if you’re building a headset or handset that connects to the new, non-existent Microsoft PBX.