RFC 1789

RFC 1789 🎀 is titled INETPhone: Telephone Services and Servers on Internet ✨. It comes from the Network Working Group and was written by C. Yang at the University of North Texas. It's dated April 1995 and in the Informational category 🦋. Its header doesn't list anything it obsoletes or updates. This is part 1 of 2 🌸

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Status of this Memo 📜

This memo gives info to the Internet community 💁. It does not specify an Internet standard of any kind, and distribution of this memo is unlimited 🌈.

IESG Note 🫶

The Transport Area Director left a comment on behalf of the Internet Engineering Steering Group 👀. This memo is an individual product of the author, so please note that well 📝. Work on standards and technology related to this topic is also happening in the IETF, in the Multiparty MUltimedia SessIon Control Working Group (MMUSIC) 🧵.

Abstract 💖

INETPhone is a true telephone service over the Internet 📞. It hooks the local telephone networks up to the Internet through INETPhone servers. So a long distance call gets split into two local calls plus an Internet connection, and end users don't even notice (it's transparent 🫠). A phone service like this running over the Internet would be a huge step toward integrated services on the Internet 🔥. To support INETPhone and set the ground rules, a scheme called "open partnership" is proposed, so the whole Internet community gets equal opportunity and benefits from it 👑.

1. Introduction ✨

Okay so, the success of classic Internet services like electronic mail, file transfer, and remote machine access 💌 inspired a whole row of new network apps. The world-wide information web, voice and video conferencing, and network telemarketing are just a few examples 📱. With more progress in infrastructure and in the architecture of integrated, multimedia information services [1,2,3], the Internet is gonna be super crucial for shaping the so-called information super-highway 🛣️.

Voice communication over the Internet probably has the most potential impact, bestie, because it competes directly with the telephone, which is basically essential to modern life 📞💀. Lots of software packages are out there now, both commercial and free-ware 🆓, that let people talk over the Internet. Some are even marketed as possible replacements for long distance phone service. Here's the catch though: so far, all of them only support voice calls using a computer that's on the Internet or connected to it through a SLIP link [4] 🙄.

This RFC presents INETPhone, a true telephone service that supports voice communication through the Internet ✨. INETPhone hooks the local phone network into the Internet. The phone network gives you local access to INETPhone using the phone stuff you already have, and the Internet carries the voice packets over long distances 🌍. Here's how it works. Someone in area A wants to call someone in area B. First, they make a local call to an INETPhone server in area A. Once connected, they key the remote phone number in area B into the server. Then the server in area A connects to another INETPhone server in area B and asks it to dial the number in area B as a local call 📲. So a long distance call is set up with two local phone connections and one Internet connection between the two INETPhone servers 🦋.

INETPhone gives you a general voice service over the Internet that works with existing telephone service 💖. Building and testing it has two motivations. On one hand, a general telephone service on the Internet would be a major step toward integrated services on the Internet, and a big challenge for the future of Internet infrastructure and protocol architecture 🏗️. On the other hand, the whole Internet community can enjoy cheap, convenient voice calls with INETPhone 🫶.

2. Design Philosophy 💅

INETPhone's design philosophy is different from most current voice communication services on the Internet in three basic ways. First, it integrates the existing telephone networks with the Internet. Second, it uses INETPhone servers to handle delivering voice packets across the Internet. Third, it's an open partnership for setting up the INETPhone service on the Internet. Let's break each one down 👇.

The conventional telephone is the most popular and convenient way to do voice communication across distances 📞. Any serious effort to bring voice onto the Internet should take full advantage of this well-established service 👑. INETPhone bridges the existing phone network with the Internet, so getting access to INETPhone is totally based on local phone services and facilities 💅. That makes access way easier and reaches a much broader user population than computer-based access does 🌸.

INETPhone is built on the client-server model 🧚. A group of INETPhone servers is responsible for accepting or initiating local calls and for delivering voice packets across the Internet. General users (the clients) can get in easily with a regular phone and a local call 📱. Having these servers takes the burden off general users and gives voice communication on the Internet a more efficient and manageable setup 🍓.

Hundreds, even thousands, of INETPhone servers will be required for wide coverage on the Internet 🙈. To cover all areas within the US, at least one server needs to be installed in each phone area code. Instead of letting a few industrial companies monopolize this service, an open-partnership scheme for INETPhone is proposed instead (see Section 5), which gives equal opportunity and benefits to the entire Internet community 💜.

3. INETPhone Servers 🧚

The INETPhone servers are the central components of the service on the Internet 🖥️. A server acts as a gateway between the telephone network and the Internet, so it has to have interfaces to both a computer network and the telephone network. Right now there are lots of commercial telephone interface cards on the market (like Dialogic's Voice Boards [5]). They handle phone operations like detecting and generating telephone signals (ring, DTMF, etc. [6]), receiving and initiating phone calls, recording (digitizing and compressing) or playing back audio signals, and monitoring how a phone call is progressing 🎧.

With the right hardware interfaces, an INETPhone server does the following 📋:

• (a) Receive a local call or accept a connection from a remote server;
• (b) Identify the PIN of a local call and determine if to proceed the call or not;
• (c) Accept a phone number for remote dialing from a local call;
• (d) Look up the local directory for a remote server of a requested call;
• (e) Make a connection to a remote server;
• (f) Make a local phone call upon the request of a remote server;
• (g) Maintain full-duplex, real-time exchanges of voice packets via Internet;
• (h) Maintain information exchanges with Directory Servers (see Section 4);
• (i) Handle exceptional conditions, such as long delay or drop of voice packets;
• (j) Monitor quality of service and keep accounting information.

Those are probably the bare minimum for each INETPhone server 💀. Other important features, like compression/decompression, security, multicasting, and voice mail, also need to be considered before a real INETPhone service goes live on the Internet 🔐. Since a general public of the Internet community might be involved, it's probably necessary to set an open standard for building INETPhone servers (see Section 5) 🌈.

4. Directory Servers 🦋

The whole point of INETPhone is to turn one long distance phone call into two local calls and an Internet connection 📞. That's why an INETPhone server is always identified by its IP address together with its local area code (and possibly its sub-regional number too). To support a dynamic configuration of INETPhone servers on the Internet, Directory Server(s) (DS) will be required to map between IP addresses and the area codes of INETPhone servers. It's kinda like a Name Server, such as BIND [7] 🧠. After an INETPhone server is installed on the Internet, it needs to register itself with a DS. The mapping info at the DS gets passed out to INETPhone servers so they can search for a remote server when a call is requested. INETPhone servers may also keep a local cache of mapping info to cut down on communication with the Directory Server(s) 📦. Again, the Directory Server function for INETPhone may require another open specification 🙃.

5. Open Partnership 👑

Voice communication and telephone service are big pieces of providing integrated information services over the Internet 💬. With commercialized services trending on the Internet, sooner or later some kind of telephone service will be launched by private companies 🏢. But the INETPhone service depends on enough INETPhone servers being installed across the Internet, and that can be achieved through a cooperative effort from the whole Internet community 🤝. This RFC proposes an open-partnership scheme for INETPhone that provides equal opportunity and benefits to the entire Internet community 💜.

Here's the outline of the proposed open-partnership scheme 📝:

• (a) Any organization or individual person can join or withdraw from this open-partnership on a voluntary base.
• (b) In order to join the partnership (therefore becoming a member of the partnership), an organization or a person should at least install and maintain an INETPhone server on the Internet with the equal capacity of lines for call-in and dial-out services.
• (c) Each member of the partnership has the equal right to use the INETPhone service through any INETPhone servers on the Internet. All services will bear the same charges based on the number of bytes transmitted through the Internet and whatever the rate (if any) laid down by the Internet authority.
• (d) A not-for-profit consortium will be formed from the representatives of all members of the partnership. The main task of the consortium is to establish all regulations and specifications of the INETPhone service, and to coordinate the execution of these rules by all the members.

7. Recommendation 🌈

If there's enough interest in INETPhone from the Internet community, the IAB may need to consider forming a special task force or working group to dig into the matter 🔍. (The numbering goes from Section 5 straight to Section 7 in the original, and I've kept it that way 🙈.)

8. References ✨

okay bestie, here are the receipts 📚 every source the RFC leans on, verbatim so nothing gets lost 🫶

[1] Adie, C., "Network Access to Multimedia Information", RFC 1614, Edinburgh University, May 1994.

[2] Braden, R., Clark, D., and S. Shenker, "Integrated Services in the Internet Architecture: an Overview", RFC 1633, ISI, MIT, Xerox PARC, June 1994.

[3] Weider, C., and P. Deutsch, "A Vision of an Integrated Internet Information Service", RFC 1727, Bunyip Information Systems, December 1994.

[4] Walters, R., "Computer Telephone Integration", Artech House Publishers, Norwood, MA, 1994.

[5] Dialogic Corporation, "Voice Hardware Reference", Parsippany, NJ, 1994.

[6] Noll, M., "Introduction to Telephones and Telephone Systems", 2nd Ed., Artech House Publishers, Norwood, MA, 1991.

[7] Albitz, P., and C. Liu, "DNS and BIND", O'Reilly & Associates, Sebastopol, Calif., 1992.

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8. Security Considerations 🔒

okay this one is serious, so listen up 💀

Security is going to be a big deal for the INETPhone service. Like, main character level of importance 😭 BUT, and this is the tea, this RFC doesn't tackle it. It chooses to leave the topic for future discussions. So no security answers in this doc, just the heads-up that it matters.

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9. Acknowledgement 🎀

Shoutout to the project behind this RFC! 🫶 It's based on a currently undergoing project supported by the Department of Computer Science, University of North Texas. Thank you, besties 💜

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10. Author's Address 💌

Here's where to find the author, verbatim:

Cui-Qing Yang
Dept. of Computer Science
University of North Texas
P.O. Box 13886
Denton, TX 76203

Phone: (817) 565-2822
Fax: (817) 565-2799
EMail: cqyang@cs.unt.edu