I’m sitting here at my NT workstation wondering how I can listen to Geddy Lee in the CD drive and still be able to hear my phone if it rings. Why isn’t there some kind of standardization for a telephone GUI on the PC? Then with the click of a virtual button I could switch from Geddy to Mr. Customer. Then the company wouldn’t have to purchase Nortel telephone hardware & pay for their support. At worst, you might have to slip another card into the PC that accepts an RJ11 telephone snap-jack but then the LAN support guys & gals (already in the budget) would take care of that.
And don’t look at me like that- I am working. There is nothing else for me to do when the phone isn’t ringing, so I listed to CDs & hope that when the phone rings I can catch that faint little flashing light in my peripheral vision.
The other option I have is rigging together some kind of plug adaptor or a/b switch that I can plug both my phone & line output into. This is well within my capabilities after working on component level electronics for 12 years, but I still wonder why there is no “software telephone” for the corporate PC.
There are things that let you connect computers to phones. They are common in sales departments - the caller ID is used to check a database to get information on a customer.
Most large to medium businesses have their own internal digital system and can do this.
I’m not sure about incoming calls; where they get converted from analog to digital.
(This is from January, though.) The initial problems were likely getting the features (caller ID, hold, conferencing…) to work, but fear of change and cost of change are probably now the biggest hold-ups. The SS7-type features will still need some work, though, but that is the way we are going. For more info try searching on IP PBX.
Voice-over-IP (VoIP) is the Next Big Thing. Many people are working on it, but there are problems with sending voice data as packets on the Internet.
With your Plain Old Telephone Service (POTS - this is a no-kidding standard acronym), you have all the bandwidth of a line for the length of your call. Even if you don’t talk, you still are using that much BW. You have a dedicated circuit for your call, and it has very good quality for voice traffic.
But when you send your voice data over packets on the Internet, there are three problems that are not there in a circuit-switched line: 1) packets are not guaranteed to get there, 2) packets can arrive with arbitrary delay between them, and 3) packets can even arrive out-of-sequence from how they were sent. All three of these cause perceived quality problems with voice data.
These are tough problems to fix. To address these, Internet routers are now selling their services with different “Quality of Service” (QoS) levels. Voice data will have a very high QoS level, so if a router gets overloaded, it will drop your data packets but will try like hell to get the voice traffic through. This is usually OK with data, since the TCP transport layer will notice something is missing and automatically ask that it be re-sent.
I’ve read that this past year, in the US, data traffic on the telecomm system finally passed voice traffic in quantity, and the data is still on a steep upwards slope. Soon, the whole telecomm system will be packet-oriented, and voice will just be a kind of data in those packets. When this happens, forget about ten-cent-a-minute long distance, it will be too cheap to meter.
Pergaps I should have mentioned that I work for Verizon in the Advanced Data Services Division, and we’re one of the groups rolling out Voice over IP hardware & soon will be placing Gigaswitches in many COs through out the Patomac & Mid-Atlantic regions. Because of this, I am well aware of what our capabilities are. Also, be assured that the present piece of telephone hardware that sits on my desk right now gives me all of your secret desires & sexual fantasies when you call in. But I’m not talking about telephony at layer 2 or higher, I’m just talking about the hardware itself.
I mean, I have this monster PC in front of me with a 600MHz processor, 37 GB hard drive & 1000 MB of RAM in it, and I use it primarily to open telnet sessions to get into our data switches & check fast packet traffic on T1s, T3s & OC pipes. I could probably do this just as easily on my 166MHz machine at home which has a 1.2G hard drive & 64 Megs of RAM. With the resources of modern NT workstations, why can’t I just take the telephone cord as it comes out of the floor & plug it into the back of my PC?
This wouldn’t be the first time something like this has happened. Ever heard of vTuner? We used to think of radios as pieces of hardware that we have to walk across the room to smash with a hammer whenever Debbie Boon’s You Light Up My Life came on. Now we can do this without getting up from our PC. I realize that vTuner gets its signal via the Inet, that’s behind the point. What I’m saying is that the piece of hardware formerly known as the AM/FM Tuner has been efficiently assimilated by the PC, so why not the telephone too?
All of the circuitry in a telephone can easily be placed on a card & slid into an expansion slot in my PC. This card could probably be a lot smaller that the circuit board in the phone because a lot of the processing power would then be done by the PC. Then I get a dialing GUI on my desktop & perhaps a peripheral keypad accessory that also plugs into the PC card, for people who still want real buttons to press when dialing out. Then I plug my headset into the PC… presto! No more hardware telephones.
Condensed version of this post: Why can’t my PC also be my telephone? Again- strictly on a hardware level.
It can. My computer has a FaxWorks program from Global Village on it. It came with the Teleport modem through Gateway. Not only does it send/receive faxes but it will also act as your phone in conjunction with the microphone and speakers that also came with machine. If you leave the program up all the time, it will also act as your answering machine. (The keypad is on the monitor.)