The Continuing Road toward Internet Media O riginally, we wanted this issue's theme to be about the broad topic of Internet media -that is, we wanted to cover all types of video and audio distribution and interaction over the Internet. What we wound up with, however, is the third in a series, spaced three years apart, of issues focused on Internet telephony. Most of the submissions we received focused on aspects of telephony in IP networking environments, and all four of the accepted articles

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... ecifically addressed telephony rather than the broader Internet media topic. We don't take this to mean that no unsolved issues remain in using the Internet to distribute media other than telephony -instead, we think the articles' focus represents the Internet's current importance in the minds of telephony professionals and researchers looking for cutting edge, yet real-world relevant, topics to work on. Internet and IP telephony is rapidly capturing mindshare across the telecommunications world. Every major US telephone company and many cable TV companies are already offering services, or at least experimenting with them, and the number of independent service providers who aren't associated with ISPs continues to grow. Most of the Fortune 500 enterprises are considering enterprise-level deployment of IP telephony, driven, at least in part, by the fact that almost no research or development work is being done on non-IP-based telephony. Equipment vendors have overwhelmingly bet their R&D dollars on the IP telephony horse. Moreover, Internet telephony has garnered attention from regulators worldwide, most of whom appear to view it no differently than they do traditional wireline-based telephony -they're not ready to deal with the fact that IP telephony services aren't necessarily constrained by the limitations of traditional circuitbased telephone connections or the 12button keypad user interface. Nor are they ready acknowledge that IP-based technologies can provide a wider range of qualities of service (QoS), which could, in turn, provide more products from which customers could select. Yet, for all the hype and regulatory