Your PC's Ringing -- Answer It!

With EtherPhone, a telephone plugged into your PC instantly gets call transfer,conferencing, and other PBX functions.

Barry Nance

There's been a lot of noise about making phone calls over the Internet, though in fact the Internet's usefulness for that purpose is limited. On a smaller scale, however, it makes a lot of sense to use your LAN to make internal phone calls. If the organization isn't too big, you might even be able to forgo an expensive, single-purpose PBX telephone system.

That's the idea behind EtherPhone , which adds telephony to an existing Ethernet LAN. An EtherPhone-based LAN offers Windows 95 users these PBX-type features: voice mail, an automated phone attendant, internal and external calls, call transfer, call hold, conf erence calling, and even music-on-hold. EtherPhone supports Telephony API (TA PI), and you can log calls in a database, such as Microsoft Access. EtherPhone converts the digitized voice signals to TCP/IP data packets (see the sidebar "Speech as LAN Data").

You replace the standard Ethernet network interface card (NIC) in each PC with Phonet's ISA-bus 10Base-T network adapter card and add Windows 95 client software. Each EtherPhone card has RJ-45 (network), RJ-11 (phone line), speaker, and microphone ports. The client software allows users to dial, answer, hold, transfer, and otherwise manage phone calls.

You need a separate Windows 95 PC running EtherPhone server software to distribute calls to the clients. This server has from one to four cards, each taking up to four outside phone lines. With the maximum 16 concurrent calls, the LAN's bandwidth is pretty well maxed out.

I set up a 133-MHz Pentium PC as an EtherPhone server, connected it to the public telephone ne twork, and plugged a standard phone into each EtherPhone client PC. The server kept up with voice-as-LAN-data, even when the client PC was busy running various Windows programs. But, with just one outside and two inside calls under way, the server needed to be dedicated to telephony. Similarly, a 486 client PC had a hard time keeping up while running other Windows programs.

I was generally pleased by Phonet's marriage of Ethernet and telephony technologies. Many functions have no on-line help, and the software occasionally burped and had to be restarted. But the drivers were reliable: I didn't lose a single phone call to software bugs.

Despite skimpy documentation, occasional glitches, and a narrow platform focus, EtherPhone is a good choice if you can't afford a PBX for your small office and you want to present a professional image to customers over the phone.

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Where to Find

EtherPhone 1.1....................price not a
nnounced

  (requires Windows 95 or NT)
Phonet Communications
Herzlia, Israel
Phone:    +972 9 502134
Fax:      +972 9 567432
E-mail:   
phonet@shani.net

Internet: 
http://www.phonet.co.il

Circle 1055 on Inquiry Card.

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EtherPhone

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Administering EtherPhone is as simple as assigning people IP addresses and phone extensions.

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Barry Nance is a BYTE consulting editor. You can reach him by sending e-mail to barryn@bix.com .