The Internet is an entity without borders, but for telephone purposes, it is considered a country unto itself.
The International Telecommunications Union has assigned the Internet its own country code–87810–to enable people using regular telephones to dial up folks who use the Internet for voice communications.
There are probably 100,000 people around the world now who make and receive phone calls over the Internet. It’s a nifty service because, like e-mail, it’s free.
The drawback is that they can communicate only with each other, not with the vast majority who don’t have Internet phones.
Giving the Internet a country code is a way of establishing a gateway between the traditional switched phone networks and Internet-based telephony. Perhaps the leading Internet phone service, Free World Dialup, launched a few months ago, plans to take advantage of the 87810 gateway, said Daniel Berninger, manager of Pulver.com, which founded FWD.
“If you want to call France, you dial 011 and then 33, which is France’s country code,” said Berninger. “If you want to call an Internet phone, you dial 011 and then 87810 followed by the number. In our case, we assign six-digit numbers to people using our service.”
While it is now possible to use a standard phone to call someone using Internet telephony, the opposite isn’t yet the case, said Berninger. People using Internet phones can call others who have them, but cannot dial folks with regular phones.
“All this is changing quickly,” said Berninger. “There was a time when almost no one had e-mail, now almost everyone does. Someday soon people with broadband service will regard voice communication over the Internet as just another feature, like e-mail.”
Cleaning up the junk: Most people who use computers in their work think there ought to be a law against junk e-mail.
A survey of 488 people who use computers in their work found that 88 percent favored legislation to control spam. The survey was commissioned by SurfControl, a firm that makes anti-spam filtering tools.
Federal legislation is proposed that would restrict pornographic or explicit e-mails and provide criminal penalties for misleading messages regarding the identity of the sender.
Susan Getgood, a SurfControl senior vice president, said that, on average, one-fourth of the e-mails businesses receive are junk.
Genetic disease research: Advances in the genetics-based approach to attacking disease will be put to the test by a deal just announced by Families of Spinal Muscular Atrophy, based in Libertyville, and Decode Genetics Inc., the Iceland-based biotech firm with a large presence in Woodridge.
Using compounds identified through previous research funded by FSMA, Decode’s chemists in Woodridge will look for new drugs to fight spinal muscular atrophy, a genetic disorder found in about one of every 6,000 births.
Previous research has identified two genes associated with the disorder and some compounds thought to help in correcting the problem. By using a mass-production approach to drug discovery, Decode researchers will look for drugs to help treat the disorder.
The three-year agreement is potentially worth $5.2 million.
“Our belief is that the investments we’ve made in basic research will soon lead to therapies that can be investigated in human trials,” said Audrey Lewis, FSMA’s executive director.
Decode’s chief executive, Dr. Karis Stefansson, also expressed optimism that his research team will discover drugs that can be used in human tests.
