Origins

In November 1988, Republic Telcom (yes, one "e") of Boulder, Colorado, received U.S. patent number 4,782,485 for a "multiplexed digital packet telephone system." The plaque from the Patent and Trademark Office describes it as follows:

A method for communicating speech signals from a first location to a second location over a digital communication medium comprising the steps of: providing a speech signal of predetermined bandwidth in analog signal format at said first location; periodically sampling said speech signal at a predetermined sampling rate to provide a succession of analog signal samples; representing said analog signal samples in a digital format thereby providing a succession of binary digital samples; dividing said succession of binary digital samples into groups of binary digital samples arranged in a temporal sequence; transforming at least two of said groups of binary digital samples into corresponding frames of digital compression.

Republic and its acquiring company, Netrix Corporation, applied this voiceover-data technology to the data technologies of the times (X.25 and frame relay) until 1998 when Netrix and other competitors introduced VoIP onto their existing voice-over-data gateways. Although attempts at Internet telephony had been made from a...