‘Call’ of the times

I have just returned from a month-long US and European trip and hardly three hours after my arrival, before I could even unpack my suitcases, I started to have coughing spasms which became severe and incessant. I rushed to my pulmonologist before her clinic closed and was told that my deviated septum condition, which more than half of the world’s population have, is very susceptible to the evils of pollution. After reading the newspapers upon my return, I am convinced that pollution in our country really exists.

While in the US with my kids for a vacation, I researched on VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) as I enjoyed and relished their company including my eldest grandchild, eight-year-old Katya. It was great! It was wonderful! I told them that they just have to take some time off from their respective professional responsibilities. Unless that’s done, and unless we are all honest and upfront with one another always, there will be a drifting away that will be hard to repair. Who was it who said that "the family you come from isn’t as important as the family you’re going to have"?

As I was about to board my flight to Madrid, they gave me two going-away gifts for my reading pleasure aboard the KLM flight: a book titled The Great Silent Grandmother Gathering by Sharon Mehdi – a writer, teacher, and grandmother. What probably attracted my kids to buy it for me, knowing the kind of person I am, was the book’s teaser: "a story for anyone who thinks she can’t save the world." The other book was titled Dreams from My Father, a New York Times bestseller. My kids know I have always been fascinated by the young 43-year-old author, Barack Obama, from the time I heard him speak during the last electoral campaign. Obama just happens to be the only Afro-American in the US Senate right now. A line near the title says "A story of race and inheritance."

Flying to Europe, I also intended to do some research on VoIP, European version, although the main reason for going to Madrid was to attend a board meeting of the Restoring Sight International, having been elected into this global foundation’s board in October last year. The foundation’s basic objective is "so that nobody will go needlessly blind." The priority project had been Project Philippines, and the number of cataract surgeries performed for the Filipino underprivileged was so impressive that it was exciting to join the foundation whose offices are based in Boston. Having two Spanish marquises on the board made the trip to Madrid not only very fruitful but also extremely rewarding, thanks to the Marques be Elzaburo and his wife, Dona Lula, and the Marques de Comillas and his wonderful children. The Marques de Comillas, whose title should sound familiar to Filipinos, has 10 children!

Endeavoring to do some research on European VoIP between meetings, dinners and sight-seeing, I became so aware that VoIP has acquired tremendous worldwide appeal and interest, this technology which provides the citizens of the world with the ability to chat directly from one computer to another, as statistics indicating the popularity of instant messaging (IM) applications reveal.

Technology has traveled by leaps and bounds, from that day in 1979 when I first got introduced to such a simple uncomplicated though technical term as POTS (plain old telephone system). Indeed, technological wonders are limited only by man’s genius and imagination.

While in the US, I found out that the total number of minutes US workers spent using the top three IM applications – AOL, MSN, and Yahoo – jumped 110 percent from 2.3 billion minutes in September 2000 to 4.9 billion in September 2001. The number of unique users of IM applications in the work arena also leapt by 34 percent from 10 million within the same period to 13.4 million. More recent figures should be even more impressive.

The communications situation is fascinating and enticing, and the possibilities exciting – conversing with someone in an IM session, then clicking a button and calling that person with voice, video, and text communications, integrated and fused into a single application. It’s like magic.

POTS is provided by what is called the PSTN (Public Switched Telephone Network). Perfecting the POTS had been, for years, a constant endeavor. This plain type of telephone network which most everyone has taken for granted, uses circuit-switched connections. This means that when you make a call, you receive a dedicated circuit from one telephone to the other, through everything in between.

Long years of study and knowledge, innovation and experience have made the PSTN achieve the quality and reliability it has today. When you pick up a phone, you expect to hear a dial tone almost instantly. I was told by a former Spanish colleague at the ITU, (International Telecommunications Union) whom I talked to in Madrid, that the level of reliability expected from the PSTN is referred to as cinco nueves, or five nines. This simply means that the entire network must be working and available 99.999 percent of the time. Therefore, it means that the network can be down for a "grand total of less than six minutes over the course of a year."

When VoIP first appeared, the easiest, most understood attraction was that of free phone calls. You and I know that there is no such thing as a free lunch, but does a free VoIP phone call really exist? Well, yes, sort of.

As far as the PSTN is concerned, the network is owned by the telephone provider. When you make a call, you are charged for the use of this network. And of course, the long-distance costs can vary depending on the distance between the caller and the callee and the time when the call occurred. As we all know, long-distance telephone calls can be a major line item in any enterprise’s budget. In the case of VoIP implementation, the network is an IP network, and the calling distance does not matter. In other words, if you own the IP network or are already paying an ISP (internet service provider) for bandwidth, mind you, then VoIP utilizes an infrastructure that is already paid for, so VoIP calls should be considered free. And here, my friend, the honorable chairman of the National Telecommunications Commission, Ronald "Pope" Solis, can disagree with me. Right now, he leads a great regulatory body that can stand the onslaught and the slings and arrows of big business.

At the Boston VON conference in October where I had been invited to attend which I reported on in a previous series on VoIP, there are two main types of benefits to VoIP: hard benefits and soft benefits. The first comes with specifically defined cost-savings, tangible and clear, i.e., having a VoIP server replace a PBX, may save an enterprise a specific amount every year. The soft benefits do not necessarily redound to saving money, or, if they do, they don’t always save an easily quantifiable amount. But they definitely have the capability to affect the bottom line in the future, i.e., the decision to innovate with unified messaging, now means that the enterprise is readily available to make another technological leap into the future.

Although both types of benefits are critical to the final ROI (return on investment), most companies pay attention more on the hard cost savings because they are easier to quantify.

All I can say at this point while the Philippine implementing rules and regulations on VoIP as a value-added service are still pending, is that VoIP enthusiasts promise many benefits over the traditional PSTN. In the US and Europe, it was obvious that an extraordinary amount of industry excitement has been generated about the great potential cost savings, the new calling features, and the reduced infrastructure of converged networks in VoIP.

Even though it rang true when Senator Barack Obama said: "As long as men are free to ask what they must – free to say what they think, free to think what they will – freedom can never be lost and technology can never regress." I’ve got something to add to this young American senator’s quote: But let those who ask and think and say, do so, rationally with the public interest and the good of their country in mind.

* * *

Thanks for your e-mails sent to jtl@pldtdsl.net.