When Harry Emerson thinks of Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), he shakes his head thinking about the millions of telephone users who give up security for inexpensive calls. And once multimedia phones, which combine voice, video and web browsing, become popular, he thinks of the intensified crime waves hackers, cyber criminals and terrorists will bring to communications.
Emerson, however, is not standing on the sidelines waiting for all of this to happen. He is a technological super-hero in the making, hoping that his secure VoIP system, dubbed IronPipe, will address identity theft and the risks of spying, hacking and even service interruptions by integrating the secure, established public switched telephone network with the rich media content of the Internet.
With 25-years experience behind him — working in various management and strategic planning capacities at AT&T — Emerson and his company, Emerson Development LLC, are ready to convince the major telephone companies and equipment suppliers that IronPipe is what they need. “It’s waiting there like an apple ready to be picked from a tree. They just need to understand the opportunity … that’s my goal, to create industry awareness.”
When IronPipe handles a multimedia call, the set-up transaction uses digital messages between the caller and the local telephone company central office. It then goes across the private data network that connects all telephone central offices. “So the central office can send that (Internet Protocol) information to the central office of the remote party, and ask if the remote party has multimedia capabilities. If the answer is yes, then the central offices send messages to both devices causing them to establish multimedia communications over the Internet,” says Emerson. “When an Internet connection is established, the system will encrypt the Internet portions of the call. However, all the key parts of it, all of the management…