The Voice Funnel was an experimental high-speed interface between digitized speech streams and a

packet switching In telecommunications, packet switching is a method of grouping Data (computing), data into ''network packet, packets'' that are transmitted over a digital Telecommunications network, network. Packets are made of a header (computing), header and ...

communications network, in particular the

ARPANET The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) was the first wide-area packet-switched network with distributed control and one of the first networks to implement the TCP/IP protocol suite. Both technologies became the technical fou ...

. It was built in the time frame from 1979 to 1981. It may be viewed as an early

Voice over IP Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), also called IP telephony, is a method and group of technologies for the delivery of speech, voice communications and multimedia sessions over Internet Protocol (IP) networks, such as the Internet. The terms In ...

voice and video telephone. The Voice Funnel was designed and built by

Bolt, Beranek and Newman Raytheon BBN (originally Bolt Beranek and Newman Inc.) is an American research and development company, based next to Fresh Pond in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. In 1966, the Franklin Institute awarded the firm the Frank P. Brown ...

. During the 1980s, it was used for audio and video conferences across the

, and later evolved into the multi-processor

BBN Butterfly The BBN Butterfly was a massively parallel computer built by Bolt, Beranek and Newman in the 1980s. It was named for the "butterfly" multi-stage switching network around which it was built. Each machine had up to 512 CPUs, each with local memory, ...

computer.

References

* Rettberg, R., C. Wyman, D. Hunt, M. Hoffman, P. Carvey, B. Hyde, W. Clark and M. Kraley. ''Development of a Voice Funnel System: Design Report'',

, Report No. 4098, August 1979. Voice over IP VoIP hardware {{network-stub

See also

References