Talk:PGPfone

I just deleted the clause "Few people had broadband at home..." because it is irrelevant; PGPFone does not require broadband (although modem based connections do have a short but perceptible lag.) It uses GSM based voice compression at selectable sample rates from 4.4 kHz to 11 kHz, which obviously doesn't require broadband to transmit or receive. This gave better-than-cellphone quality voice over a 33.6k modem, and was still quite usable over a 14.4k modem. (Checks the manuals if you like; they are easily available on line.) 14.4k modems were available from 1991, and 28.8k was available from 1994 and common by 1996.

I am also rather dubious about MITs claim that it probably no longer works. The app most certainly still runs on Windows XP SP3, and I have made calls with it on Windows XP SP2 (I haven't made any calls since putting SP3 on my Windows boxen, as, indeed, very few people use it anymore.)

Unfortunately I think it would be original research to add this, but IMHO three factors that stopped PGPFone from being widely used by were:

1. . There was no directory service. If your other correspondent was on dial-up (as was usually the case), you had to contact them by some other means (e.g. email, IRC) and ask their current IP address, ask them to fire up PGPFone and start listening, then connect to that;
2. . Since internet connection was always UDP port 4747 and was not configurable, it could be quite hard to make it work through NAT (and impossible if the receiver had no control over his NAT); and
3. . Although voice quality was generally good, calling over a modem introduced perceptible delays due to modem mungifying of packets. This was no big deal if you had a good headset (uncommon at the time) but over standard cheap audio equipment (speakers and mike) feedback and echoing was a constant annoyance.

And according to Phil Zimmerman, writing in the README for the last version to be released, the product fell in to desuetude because PGP Inc had no interest in it, because they were only interested in marketing to bug corporate IT departments, who were not interested. (Phil doesn't give any hint why they weren't interested, but as I recall, somewhere around that time the big phone companies were trying to convinve evryone that voice over IP was illegal.) -- Securiger (talk) 11:38, 2 November 2008 (UTC)