VOiP - Timeline

From the invention of the telephone to the VOIP we know today.

1876 - Alexander Graham Bell invents the telephone.

1927 - The first transatlantic call is made over radio waves.

1958 - The Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) is formed by the US government to expand America's technological frontiers, in response to the USSR's launch of Sputnik 1 the previous year.

1960s - The US telephone system gradually begins converting its internal connections to a packet-based, digital switching system.

1961 - Leonard Kleinrock at MIT publishes the first paper on packet switching theory.

1962 - JCR Licklider, of MIT, publishes a paper discussing his “Galactic Network” concept. He envisioned a globally interconnected set of computers through which everyone could quickly access data and programmes from any site.

1962 - ARPA forms the Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO), which conducts research on command and control systems.

1965 - The first wide area computer network is built.

1967 - MIT researcher Lawrence G. Roberts, intending to realise Licklider's idea, publishes his plan for the “Arpanet”.

1969 - The first node is connected to the Arpanet. By the end of that year, four host computers are connected.

1970 - The first packet network, AlohaNet, is developed at the University of Hawaii.

1970 - The Network Working Group (NWG) finishes the initial Arpanet host-to-host protocol, called the Network Control Protocol (NCP).

1972 - ARPA becomes DARPA (Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency). It subsequently went back to ARPA on 22 February 1993, and then back to DARPA again on 11 March 1996.

1972 - Arpanet is publicly demonstrated for the first time at the International Computer Communication Conference (ICCC).

1973 - The Network Voice Protocol (NVP) is first implemented by internet researcher Danny Cohen of the Information Sciences Institute (ISI), University of Southern California, with funding from ARPA's Network Secure Communications (NSC) programme.

1973 - FTP (File Transfer Protocol) is introduced.

1973 - Arpanet makes its first international connection, while Bob Kahn and Vint Cerf team up to develop the details of the protocols that will become TCP/IP.

1973 - Bob Metcalfe at Xerox PARC develops Ethernet technology.

1973 - Dr Martin Cooper of Motorola Corporation makes what was probably the first cellular telephone call on a portable handset called the Dyna-Tac. After a successful test run, he took it to New York to introduce the technology to the public.

1973 - The experimental Network Voice Protocol is invented for the ARPANET providers.

1974 - BBN announces “Telenet”, the first public packet data service.

1977 - Fibre-optic cables are first used for telephone transmission when both GTE and AT&T laid fibre-optic lines in Chicago and Boston.

1980s - The telecommunications industry conceived that digital services would follow much the same pattern as voice services, and conceived a vision of end-to-end circuit switched services, known as the Broadband Integrated Services Digital Network (B-ISDN).

1980 - Widespread development of workstations, PCs and LANs.

1983 - The Arpanet host protocol changes from NCP to TCP/IP as of 1 January.

1984 - A standards movement is started by the International Telephone and Telegraph Consultative Committee (CCITT), now known as the International Telecommunications Union (ITU). The ITU is a United Nations organisation that coordinates and standardises international telecommunications.

1984 - The National Science Foundation develops the first wide area network designed specifically to use TCP/IP.

1985 - The internet is a well-established technology supporting a wide community of researchers and developers.

1986 - The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) starts as a quarterly meeting of US government-funded researchers.

1987 - The idea for ADSL is introduced by Joe Leichleder, a Bellcore researcher.

1988 - Leichleder develops ADSL by placing wideband digital signals above the existing baseband analogue voice signal carried between telephone company central offices and customers on conventional twisted pair cabling.

1988 - Robert Morris sends a worm through the internet, affecting 6 000 of the 60 000 hosts on the network.

1989 - The first ISPs, including the first dial-up ISP world.std.com, are formed.
1989 - DSL is developed.

1990 - Arpanet is decommissioned and McGill University releases the Archie search engine.

1990 - Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau, working at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN), jointly propose to create a hypertext system (HTTP and HTML) accessible via browsers, which would form the basis of the World Wide Web.

1992 - The Internet Society is formed and the IETF is transferred to operate under it as an independent international standards body.

1993 - One of the first graphical web browsers, Mosaic, is released by Marc Andreessen at the US National Centre for Supercomputing Applications.

1994 - A DSL Forum is formed to help telephone companies and their suppliers realise the great market potential of ADSL.

1995 - The first internet phone software is released by Vocaltec.

1996 - POP3 (Post Office Protocol version 3) is published.

1996 - Internet phones catch the attention of US telecommunication companies, which ask the US Congress to ban the technology.

1997 - The original version of IEEE 802.11, the wireless LAN standard, is released.

1997 - 2 000th request for comments – “Internet Official Protocol Standards” – from the internet Architecture Board. The American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN) is established to handle administration and registration of IP numbers to the geographical areas currently handled by Network Solutions (InterNIC), starting March 1998.

1998 - Three IP switch manufacturers introduce equipment capable of switching.

1998 - French internet users give up their access on 13 December to boycott France Telecom's local phone charges (which are in addition to the ISP charge).

2005 - The one-billionth internet user goes online.

2006 - Mass-market VOIP services over broadband internet access services are popular and successful.