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EFF Patent Busting - Prior Art Needed for VOIP
JumperCable writes "The Electronic Frontier Foundation is seeking to bust an overly broad patent by a company called Acceris. Acceris claims patents on processes that implement voice-over-Internet protocol (VoIP) using analog phones as endpoints. These patents cover telephone calls over the Internet. Specifically, the claims describe a system that connects two parties where the receiving party does not need to have a computer or an Internet connection, but the call is routed in part through the Internet or any other 'public computer network'. The calls must also be 'full duplex', meaning that both parties can listen and talk at the same time, like in an ordinary phone call. To bust these overly broad claims, we need 'prior art' — any publication, article, patent or other public writing that describes the same or similar ideas being implemented before September 20, 1995."
Not over the internet, or using intetnet protocol, so it's not VOIP.
(note to mods: I know I've posted this 3 times in reply to different people, but I maintain it's not redundant until people actually grok the concept and stop posting/modding up non VOIP references.)
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Sorry, if the IBM system never touches PSTN as you describe, then this fails part 4 of the EFF's list of features the prior art needs to have:
From the EFF site: CRITICAL FEATURES OF PRIOR ART NEEDED:
1. The system must have the ability to connect an audio telephone call from a calling party to a receiving party.
2. The telephone call must be "full duplex," meaning that both parties must be able to talk and listen at the same time. For example, regular telephone calls usually are full duplex, whereas walkie-talkie conversations in which a person cannot receive transmissions from others while he or she is transmitting generally are not.
3. An ordinary telephone and telephone line are the only equipment the receiving party needs to have. The receiving party does not need to have a computer or an Internet connection to receive the call.
4. The transmission of the call is routed in part through a "public computer network" and in part through the PSTN. This implies that the transmission must cross at least one gateway between the "public computer network" and the PSTN. The Internet is one example of a "public computer network," but the patent does not define what else would qualify as a "public computer network."
Additional Features:
1. The caller must only have to dial the destination number and no additional phone numbers
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I believe IS-95, the first publicly used version of CDMA, which was in public use in 1995, carries voice packets over a TCP/IP network from the phone to the mobile switch. From there, the full duplex phone call terminates on any phone on the PSTN.
The question is whether the Sprint or Verizon IS-95 infrastructure constitutes a 'public network'. I would think so.
Wikipedia includes a lot of detail about IS-95, as do books on CDMA available on Amazon, so presumably Qualcomm does not mind publication of high level characterizations of it. I also sat through classes in CDMA at UCSD which described IS-95 in glowing detail. So I have good reason to believe none of this is confidential. EIA/TIA/IS-95 and IS-99 and IS-707 are published specifications available from Global Engineering.
I learned about this TCP/IP network in 1996 while developing 'data devices' to run on the IS-99 (data) overlay of IS-95. In order to present a TCP/IP socket to a handset application (which could terminate anywhere on the web), we had to run an additional TCP/IP stack. That is, our application formed a PPP connection to TCP, wrapped in IP, then PPP again, which was wrapped in the lower stack TCP and the lower stack IP. The lower stack terminated at the mobile switch (enhanced to handle IS-99), with L2TP or PPTP connection to an IP router. The upper stack terminated on a web server. It seemed like an insanely complex link, but it worked surprisingly well because of the highly tuned TCP/IP stack running on the Qualcomm chipset. (I think this connection was later branded as "QuickNetConnect".)
That is, the lower stack wasn't there for data. It was there, I believe, for Voice (Over IP) services in IS-95.