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 high speed digital paths (ISDN, xDSL, ...)
• emergence of intergated traffic (Does this imply B-ISDN? perhaps not)
• "phone" programs for placing long distance calls across the internet, loss of traditional income sources
• 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 and perhaps no more traditional telecom interfaces!

Voice Gateways:

• Lucent voice gateway was developed (by and with) MiBridge (http://www.mibridge.com/)
• Ascend Communications will announce voice capability this month