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

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).

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.

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.

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).