Coupling the PSTN and the Internet telephony worlds

Coupling of voice and data communication systems (perhaps unification of these formerly separate worlds).

Driven by a number of features:

• emergence of ISDN
• emergence of B-ISDN
• "phone" programs for placing long distance calls across the internet
• exploding Multimedia computing market
  • therefore, nearly all new PCs have audio input and output (highend ones even have video input and output)
  • OS and other support for audio is becoming standard
  • more and more multimedia information being broadcast, pointcast, ...

LAN(s) provide the local interconnections between the various types of networks ==> no more PBXs!

"The biggest PC OEMs have carrier-class telephony servers in their sights"

- "Telephony Servers" by Zigurd Mednieks
http://www.phonezone.com/opinion/tservers.htm