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-based 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.

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