able to tackle the (then) lucrative voice transfer market. Of course, IP telephony was not going materialize overnight. 18,19,20 Telephony, as dictated by the ergonomics and the sensitivities of the human ear, is a very demanding application in terms of the acceptable latency and quality required to satisfy a user. Even the term satisfaction is rather generic as voice applications have different levels of acceptable quality for different levels of cost; hence, terms such as toll quality are not always appli- cable (Bellamy). 21 Besides the issue of audible quality, which could arguably be addressed with the advancements in low-bit-rate vocoders, users had to come to grips with the different statistics of the new traffic that mixes everything in the same digital bucket-voice audio, video, and data. Traditional telephony sta- tistics are extremely well understood and predictable. That fact was at the heart of the study and deployment of the public telephony network many decades ago. With the arrival of the Internet on the global communications market, however, everyone realized that this was a very unpredictable medium in terms of traffic load. Consequently, to be able to offer reliable telephony over an IP network, the new-generation carriers found out that they either had to have their own intranet, where they could more or less manage the allocation of bandwidth, or they had to have access to specific pieces of pow- erful transmission/routing equipment on the Internet with the appropriate resource reservation proto- cols, such as the Resource Reservation Protocol (RSVP) and Real-Time Protocol (RTP). 22,23 Whether this meant that alliances were needed with companies serving the backbone of the Internet or that only well-heeled players would have a chance to compete in this new business, only time would tell. (In many cases, these new carriers included some older guard carriers such as AT&T or Verizon, who shed their old skin and adapted themselves by reacting appropriately to the evolution of the industry.) It co