Audio/Video Conference with iChat and AIM

JHromadka writes "Apple and AOL released today new versions of their instant messaging software that allows audio and video conferencing between Mac iChat users and Windows AIM users. " Anyone else think we're nearing the end of the analog phone system?

Comments

Ya right

[QuaZar666]

I don't see standard POTS phones going away anytime soon as much as a I wish it would. People still use fax machines, impact printers, and dialup. Before POTS can go completly away we would first need to get rid of at least fax machines and dialup.

Re:Ya right

[nat5an]

Just my two cents, but unless it works almost exactly like an ordinary telephone, people won't be interested in using it. That is to say it has to "just work." No booting up computers, configuring peripherals, setting a proxy server, opening a port in your firewall, getting someone's IP address, etc. A techie might be comfortable with doing that, and I could see this catching on in a corporate environment, but for Joe Homeuser, seems like a lot of hassle, at this point. That said, if it's not significantly more complicated than a cellphone, it could catch on within 10-20 years, if it's cheaper or a lot more useful.

Re:no end to analog

[rainman_bc]

Didn't you learn ANYTHING watching the A-Team? I recall almost every third episode they hacked a landline with a phone tap :)

End of analog?

[Godeke]

Didn't anyone read the "technologies that refuse to go away" article? Analog phones have so many advantages over digital technology that I find it hard to believe they will go away anytime soon.

1. Ubiquity: not just in the US, but world wide. The analog phone network links many countries that will take a long time to bring enough bandwidth to make digital conversations useful. Even in the US, there are a *lot* of places where you can't get broadband. If you are doing video you *need* broadband. If you are doing voice, you *want* broadband for the lower latency.

2. Reliability: with the exception of *major* disasters (which would bring any network down) the analog phone system just works. I keep one corded phone in the house because it works when the power goes out. (Handy, say, to call the electrician on.) My PC will last 15 minutes on battery backup: not what I want to rely on if I come home to a dark house. My local cable provider has "digital phone" service which has outage issues at least once a month, and sometimes weekly. My cell phone is likewise prone to sudden disconnects, but I put up with it for the sake of being mobile.

3. Quality of Service: I have a few friends too cheap to pay for long distance who like to voice chat over Yahoo and other services. It works. Kinda. Except when it doesn't, and drops the connection, or crashes or makes my sound card cry. But even when it works, it sounds bad.

That isn't to say these are insurmountable problems. The analog phone network is mostly digital at it's core, so it isn't a matter of technology, per se. Instead, it is the attempt to shoehorn voice over IP, and particularly over the laggy, drop prone and quirky public Internet. Voice is almost there, if you have good broadband. Video is a joke still: it reminds me of Internet radio about 4 years ago, mostly a novelty. It is going to take a lot of work at the infrastructure layer to make digital VOIP and video a common occurrence that is relied upon, instead of as a novelty, or in applications where people put the infrastructure in place themselves (tele-medicine, big companies with video conferencing between T1 connected locations, etc).

Re:End of analog?

[edwdig]

To support your theory, here's a story I heard from my Uncle, who retired from Verizon about a year or two ago. He worked there for over twenty years. I forget the original company he started working for, but he ended up in Verizon after several mergers.

In the past, management positions were awarded to people who worked their way up through the ranks. That meant they understood how the phone networks worked, and in a crises, knew how to fix the problems.

Now, people are hired straight into management positions. When there's a crisis, they don't know what to do. They give orders which don't help the problem. The people below them ignore their orders and do what needs to be done. In the end, the problem gets solved and the management is unaware of why it really got solved.

Cell Phones ?

[rhino_badlands]

i think cell phones already broke that barrier long long ago, most college kids now have a cell phone rather then getting a phone for their dorm or house/apartment. And i also know that alot of other people are doing this aswell for home and buisness.

Re:Cell Phones ?

[davidhan]

In countries that don't have a high percentage of land line penetration, wireless comm often expand at a faster rate and overtake land lines. Its easier and cheaper to roll out cell networks than it is to lay cable to everyone house.

Re:no end to analog

[viking099]

That and most people don't like the idea of having to look at whoever they're talking to, or have who they're talking to looking at them.

Who here even stays seated the entire time they're on the phone anyway? Cordless phones were a huge hit for a reason; it lets people do other things when they're on the phone, although that can be a bad thing (like when you're talking to someone and you realize they're using the bathroom) Yeah. Video phones won't be very useful outside of business transactions.

Not likely the end... ever.

[reiggin]

Remember that very recent article on here about technologies that refuse to die? 100 years from now, analog phones will be on that list. iChat/AIM is great but my mother will never use it. Same can be said for VoIP.

Re:Not likely the end... ever.

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

iChat/AIM is great but my mother will never use it. Same can be said for VoIP.

I say bull.

There are 3 things that count with new technologies : (1) the technology, (2) packaging, (3) packaging. If you package VoIP in the form of a telephone set that plugs into the wall, doesn't take a genius to configure and provides the same sort of service (no choppiness, somewhat okay phone quality, and the ability to dial a number), your mom will use it.

The best example is the Tivo : it's 20+ years people have been able to record shows at predefined times with VHS recorders, even sometimes using barcodes printed in TV guides so you don't have to program your VCR yourself. Yet that sort of application is only taking off since Tivo and ReplayTV, because they realized they should take the basic idea and turn it into a box that connects onto some wall socket, asks your zip code to configure itself, dials, do everything for you, and then present you with menus and things that a 6 year old can understand. But in the end, Tivo boxes are VCRs on steroid. The success comes from the packaging.

I never understood

[CompWerks]

Why we need to see the person on the other end of the line unless they were giving a presentation or something.

Other then that it's quite useless unless you are going to make faces at each other or possibly have cyber-sex but then again we're talking about the /. crowd.

Re:I never understood

[Clod9]

You've never lived for a few months with your fiancee on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, have you?
And now that we're married, she only sees her family once a year and in pictures.
We'd pay good money for an easy videoconferencing solution.

ICQ next?

[F. Mephit]

So then the last major compatibility gap to bridge will be to get a version of ICQ that's compatible with those two (and vice versa)? Or better yet, Trillian?

NAT

[phreak03]

As long as everyone is NAT'ed and firewalled, P2P based technology that requires dirrect comunication will be limited to the geeks (now at the moment though, anyone not running some form of NAT firewall on a DSL or cable line is a idiot) But the technoidiots don't know how to port forward so these technologies will not work At my university we all have our own IP's but All incomeing ports are blocked.........

AOL and video

[hey]

Wasn't there a ruling that said AOL would need to allow other IM systems to connect once they got video going.
Or did they slime out of that?

Why can we just all go Jabber.

Re:gaim

[Echnin]

I think what he means is that persons using any of the three most used operating systems will be able to communicate over one network.

Re:Analog and Natural Disasters

[jkabbe]

And then there was the blackout last summer where my analog phone was a paperweight but my cell phone kept on going (although the signal got pretty week as towers started going down).

No.

[El]

If videoconferencing is so great, why is it that every time I see Netmeeting used for Application Sharing and/or video, business is still using a speakerphone for audio? Could it have something to do with the internet introducing drop out and up to 2 second delays in audio? For real-time communication, bringing up a dedicated virtual circuit really does have some advantages over using a packet-switched network, especially for audio. Now, if we actually had the infrastructure in place throughout the entire internet to reserve end-to-end bandwidth (e.g. RSVP) and ensure reliable, timely delivery, we could effectively have virtual circuits over the Internet -- with a corresponing increase in cost for the higher Quality Of Service.

from the beginning-of-the-end-of-the-analog-phones

[H8X55]

Anyone else think we're nearing the end of the analog phone system?

Because of Audio/Video Conference with iChat and AIM? As they say in Chinatown, "Nickel preeze!". Instant Messeging and Web chats are great, for back and forth conversation, but have you ever tried to tell a joke or story? Forever long.

Face to face (or screen to screen) video conferencing is still grainy at best for most consumer grade products availble.

Cell phones are great for portabilty and catching me on the go, but if someone calls my cell when i'm in the office or at home, i always call 'em back on a land line. It sounds better, and i still don't have "unlimited" minutes on my cell plan. Too damn expensive. I have friends out in the sticks that get zero or minimal cell reception out in BFE.

Increased VoIP saturation might help bring down POTS, but you've still got reliabilty issues. My land line goes down once or twice every three to five years, usually as a result of some type of natural disaster, but my power goes off every couple months. No power, no DSL modem, no router, no VoIP phone. What if you need to call the power company or 911?

Nope, sorry folks, POTS is here to stay, maybe not forever, but it's not going anywhere in the next ten years.

NITPICK - POTS != analog

[wowbagger]

The Plain Old Telephone System is not analog, save the "last mile" to your house. As soon as you hit the line card, you are a 8 kSample/sec 8 bit/sample digital data stream.

What you MEANT to say was, "How long until the end of the circuit-switched network is replaced by a packet-switched network."

And when you start throwing Quality-Of-Service guarantees, bandwidth guarantees, and everything else to make a packet-switched network have the level of performance and reliability that the circuit-switched network has, guess what - you've just created a circuit-switched network!