Kim Thesiger Kim Thesiger is co-founder of Gossiptel, the UK 's first internet telephony company Interviewed by Hamish Mackintosh Thursday June 17, 2004 The Guardian How would you describe Voice over Internet Protocol? It's the technology that enables you to make and receive phone calls using an internet connection. But the technology is much wider than that - it's also about instant messaging and presence , which is knowing when someone's online, how they want to be contacted etc. It's about any way of connecting two computers and allowing them to converse, be it text, voice or video. You're already beginning to see people enabling computer-gaming sites with the telephony aspect so that people can talk among themselves while playing. Is this a direct result of broadband coupled with the new Session Initiated Protocol (SIP)? Exactly ... while VoIP has been around for the past 10 years, most people's experience of it has been quite poor-quality and they were using it on modems. Now, you have a mass market of 4m UK broadband users and also this SIP (www.webopedia.com/TERM/S/SIP.html), which Microsoft has built into Windows XP and Sysco, Siemens and most other major manufacturers are building it into their products, too. Effectively, broadband plus SIP equals the ability to really use this technology properly. A lot of the instant messaging clients such as Apple's iChat (www.apple.com/ichat/) and AOL (www.aol.co.uk/aim/) already use SIP, so it is enabling a large part of what we're doing between computers today. Is this the next step for Instant Messaging? One of the reasons it was developed was to enable all the instant messaging companies to interoperate. From a users point of view, that makes sense as it's crazy that I can only chat to other MSN users (http://messenger.msn.com) or other iChat users. You don't actually need a computer do you? One reason a lot of people think broadband telephony is going to be a major driver of broadband is the huge savings to be made with the ability to make free calls to the other side of the world. We think it will interest people who just want to make the calls and don't necessarily want a computer. Is VoIP hungry on bandwidth? We'll be giving users the ability to select that themselves. Out of the box it uses about 80kbps, which is comfortably within even the lowest of the broadband range. That gives you better qual ity than an ordinary phone line. If, for some reason, you wanted to use less bandwidth then you can bring it down to a lower bandwidth codec, which will still be as good as a standard line. Is VoIP the next big thing for the net? I think you'll see a lot of competing services coming out, which has to be good news for the consumer. People I speak to in the industry estimate that in 10 years' time, all communications and telephony will be IP-_base_d and that your television and internet will be coming down a broadband line. There is already a company in France called Free (www.free.fr), which is offering 11 hours of free telephony, multichannel TV and 1MB per second internet all over DSL for €30 a month.  Visit: www.gossiptel.com

How would you describe Voice over Internet Protocol? It's the technology that enables you to make and receive phone calls using an internet connection. But the technology is much wider than that - it's also about instant messaging and presence , which is knowing when someone's online, how they want to be contacted etc. It's about any way of connecting two computers and allowing them to converse, be it text, voice or video. You're already beginning to see people enabling computer-gaming sites with the telephony aspect so that people can talk among themselves while playing. VOIP is one of those transparent technologies.  That is the user doesn't care how it works so long as it does.  Just about every commerical and govt enterprise in the US and Canada is converted or converting to this technology because the savings on long distance calls alone will pay for the conversion in a very short time.  Then there is the bonus of other digital broadband services.  VOIP of course drives the telcos nuts because there goes their revenue stream. If Singapore has not gone this route yet its probably Singtel has a monopoly and wants to hold on to its high and unjustifiable charges. Can anyone advise on this?