Stardate 20010717.0753 (On Screen): I've never believed "phone over internet" and I still don't. The only reason for it to exist is as a way of evading long distance charges, but in every other regard it makes no sense at all. The internet is a poor medium in its current form for real-time streaming connections such as video or voice, because those things require short and constant latency, and as many real-time gamers can tell you the internet doesn't offer either of those things.
In the 1960's a satellite was put into geosynchronous orbit over the Atlantic for purposes of carrying voice calls. The first demonstration call made over it was (I believe) televised, in fact. But the problem with it was that the time delay was too great. A bidirectional call had to travel up to the satellite and back down again twice, and this resulted in a half-second delay in the round-trip time. And surprisingly, this makes conversation difficult. A two-tenths second delay is tolerable but half a second is not. So while geosynchronous satellites are big business and carry huge amounts of data, none of it is voice calls. Trans-Atlantic voice calls are carried on undersea cables, which have much less latency. Those same cables (and others like them buried all over the place on dry land) also carry the Internet, but the mechanisms of the internet impose substantial delays, and sometimes it can take a packet a couple of seconds to fly (or crawl) from one place to another. And nothing in WinXP (or any other operating system) is capable of changing that. (discuss)
