Over time, the phone network and the computing networks will converge. The technology underlying the telephone will dramatically improve in areas such as messaging, interactive voice response and so on. People will also apply the computer, especially in business, as a rich device for information and call control. For instance, instead of dialing, users can point and click a name in an address book, and the computer will make the phone connection. Computers are already being used as answering machines and fax machines. Networked computers are also being used to provide "paging", "messaging", and even telephone voice transmissions.
As a result of the convergence between telephone and computing networks, public carriers will be able to leverage many of the technologies the Internet or ISPs provide to offer new services to their customers. Telephony is one such new service. The application of the Internet to provide the medium of telephone transfer has the potential to provide better, static and interference free signals, at the same price as a local telephone access, no matter where in the world a person may want to call, as long as there is an internet telephone reflector (also called a gateway) at that location. One ambitious project to use the Internet for long distance telephone communication is the Free World Dialup project. The project intends to place internet telephone reflectors around the world. An internet telephone reflector is much like a switchboard which accepts calls from a normal phone line and transfers it through the internet to another reflector. The receiving reflector would then transfer the call back to a normal phone line at the receiving end. And on the Interent there is no such thing as "long distance".
A technical limitation of this new technology is much the same as any other Internet communication application, one of bandwidth, particularly for people accessing the Internet over modemed phone lines. Thus work is progressing on better compression algorithms to reduce the data that must be transmitted, or increase the throughput of the modem.
Along a related note, digital modems, and eventually digital phones have the potential to replace analog modems and phone. Digitized data is a much better and compactible data format than analog signals, thus providing increased throughput. Technological advances will soon allow digitized data transmission through ordinay copper phone lines at higher throughput than ISDN lines, thus allowing fast downloads and uploads of Internet data, transmission of digitized video such as for High-Definition Television (HDTV) programming on cable, as well as transmission of telephony, all simultaneously, through a single copper phone wire.
Most of the public telephone network providers are also Internet Service Providers and/or have announced plans to provide Internet Telephony service.
