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From: jbn@wdl1.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.dcom
Subject: Re: Packetized Voice
Message-ID: <416@wdl1.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 14-May-85 19:02:38 EDT
Article-I.D.: wdl1.416
Posted: Tue May 14 19:02:38 1985
Date-Received: Sun, 19-May-85 08:27:29 EDT
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Organization: Ford Aerospace, Western Development Laboratories
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Nf-From: wdl1!jbn    May 14 13:25:00 1985


      Packet voice seems to be one of those futuristic ideas, like monorails,
whose time has passed.  Xerox PARC played around with it a few years ago,
building a rather expensive unit that allowed voice transmission over Ethernet.
But it was never made into a product, and wasn't that useful even at PARC.
Digital voice I/O gear is now easy to come by; the Texas Instruments PC is
available with voice I/O; they provide an answering machine program as a demo.
Unfortunately, the TI machine lacks DMA, so you can't run most Ethernet cards.
BBN has been playing around with packet voice for years now, with no really
interesting results; you can send voice over the ARPANET but the net has to 
be gimmicked to give voice data extra priority for it to work.  The only
real justification for packet voice seems to be for high-reliability 
jam-resistant military systems.  And even there there are other approaches.

					John Nagle