The Internet Telephony Red Herring

The spectre of low-cost, real-time voice communication over the Internet has polarised Internet service providers and telephone network operators, at the expense of finding solutions to the problem of integrating communications services (in particular, existing wireless and wireline telephony) with WWW content services. This paper argues that such solutions not only exist and appear to be commercially viable, but could bring about a transformation of the WWW as a tool for business and personal communications.