Digital Boomerang Singapore 

Internet chat technologies are poised to take the pie away from long distance carriers, but not just yet.

In my last column, I introduced some internet technologies which allow web users to talk over the internet PC-to-PC and provided a short “how-to” on getting started. This column will cursorily discuss the effect Internet chat technologies have on traditional long distance carriers.

The line of argument here is simple. If everyone can chat over the net and pay only Internet charges, which are usually much less than long distance telephone charges, long distance carriers will not survive. Or, at the very least, they cannot survive based on their current fee charging and business model.

It is tempting and easy to make a blanket statement predicting the vaporization of long distance carriers and end the discussion with finality. However, the truth of the matter is that long distance carriers are still very much “a thing of the present”.

Internet chat technologies, though having evolved rapidly, are still far from perfect. I, myself, have been frustrated over its limitations and eventually turned to the phone. The result? I chocked up a phone bill twice as fat because I had to get the same “volume” of chatting done to satiate my appetite and if I couldn’t do it over the net, I had to do it over the phone. As much as I hated to admit it, being an ardent fan of the Internet and technology in general, I had to. Long distance carriers are here to stay.

I know what you are thinking. As technology improves, wouldn’t all these frustrations go away? Well, it really depends on how much it improves and in what area it improves.

To put it broadly, there are two aspects of the voice chat technologies: the frills and the network. The frills include anything that is not part of the network such as the voice quality, the software interface and duplexing. The network is the fundamental backbone upon which voice data is transferred over the Internet.

The frills can all be improved upon. Voice quality has already improved considerably and promises to get better with the many new standards standards spawning. Full-duplex conversations can already be carried out on a few software programs i.e. both parties can chat at the same time instead of having to take turns to talk and listen. For those adventurous enough to try, you can download FireTalk which is one of the better full-duplex chat software that is available.

The network, on the other hand, is not so easy to improve. “The server is down” is a statement that one still hears very often. eBay’s outage lasting over 20 hours just barely 6 months ago is proof enough that the problem is both real and eminent. It is much less often that one hears that the phone line is down.

The problem is further compounded by the fact that chatting over the net is free which means that the network servers are running at someone’s cost and we all know how free services come with exclusion caveats. In short, no one can guarantee that the voice chat servers will always be up and running and given the “free” factor, no one might ever want to do so. If the “free” factor is taken away, then how cheap must it be priced in order to get users to install chat software, connect to the internet and bug their internet access providers to do troublesome, techy things like “allow both TCP and UDP packets to pass through ports 8000-9000″?

It is clear then that long distance carriers will not vaporize into thin air. Their presence is much needed in a world that depends heavily on both reliability and efficiency. A more detailed and thorough debate is out of the scope of this column, however, if you are interested in reading more, check out the Internet & Telecoms Convergence Consortium site. Gotta go chock up my phone bill now.

- First published on IT AsiaOne, This is IT

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