There are hundreds of millions of Internet and mobile telephone users across the globe that have experienced GIPS voice and video technology roughly the same amount who don’t know they had the experience. It has been a seamless and enjoyable experience (unless the conversation turned sour…sorry we can’t do anything about that) allowing people to connect more clearly and on a far richer level than the tired old telephone that currently sits in the corner of your office or home – rarely used.
A brief history…The telephone that Scotsman Alexander Graham Bell invented in 1876 and made the first call was ground breaking – it was born out of Bell’s passion and teaching to help deaf people to be fully integrated into society. Nearly four decades later the first transcontinental call was made from New York to San Francisco. There were other improvements but pretty much nothing had changed until recently.
GIPS and HD voice popped along but it still remains pretty much an undiscovered technology to the majority of people around the world. On the one hand that’s a depressing story on the other hand it’s great – a huge opportunity lies ahead. From everyday phone calls, conference calls to emergency services – vast improvements are available and the tide will turn – especially as we migrate from the old copper wire to IP networks that run underground.
But HD voice is not the end of the story, it’s only the beginning. Video chat and video conferencing is becoming more prevalent. As people become more familiar with Skype, Gmail and Yahoo video chat – the more at ease people are with video as a communication channel.
So while we have GIPS engineers across the world, coding, de-bugging and tinkering with the perfection of HD video and voice communication – their biggest goal is not writing cool pieces of code it’s the user experience.
So it was nice to see some outside validation of GIPS’ efforts recently. In a company interview with San Jose Mercury reporter Mike Swift, he wrote: “In short, the [GIPS video] technology is good enough that you start to forget about the technology, and concentrate on the conversation.”
It was very nice to read and I couldn’t have said it better myself. As our engineers recognize we aim to please our customer and their users. The experience is what matters – that’s why our engineers spend their waking lives trying to figure out how to make the experience both simple and better for users. It also allows our customers to focus on their business by relying on the latest video and voice technology keeping them one step ahead of the game: “Yahoo says its video chat traffic is up since it launched its latest version of Messenger with the GIPS technology … people in video conversations … now spend double the time per call as people on audio-only calls.”
So from Mr. Bell’s telephone call back in 1915 when Dr. Bell and Mr. Watson, (his former associate) talked and “heard each other much more distinctly than they did in their first talk thirty-eight years ago,” we now have video and you can see more clearly and communicate far better than before.
That’s not the only thing that’s changed. Back in 1915 the charge for a telephone conversation between New York and San Francisco was $20.70 for the first three minutes, and $6.75 for each minute thereafter. That same five-minute call today from San Francisco to New York cost would cost the equivalent of $756 in today’s money. Today we can video chat, have HD calls for much, much less.
