Call You Free

CYF is the abbreviation of CALL YOU FREE. Call You Free is a free web communication service originally developed to encourage communication in the internet community, the internauts.

However, several tentatives failed at the beginning and internauts took some time to approve the initiative because of hardware and bandwidth limitations by the time it was developed. Other developers released similar products but the distinctive features of Call You Free was that it used Click2Call Technology, that lets the caller place his webcall using a webphone within a browser. Remember that all the earliest transmissions of voice over internet protocol required separate software to establish the communication. We are talking about using only the internet browser. That was really a new concept.

Many complaints fall over CALL YOU FREE, specially from the open source community, because originally it was developed to run for Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (version 5 or higher), but today other developers joined the project to develop it for other internet browsers.

History

The first steps developing Call you Free Technology dated from 1995/1997. They were conducted by Claudio Rosemffet from the University of Belgrano (Argentina), Pablo Cuello from de University of Buenos Aires and Fernando Speranza from de University of El Salvador, with the main purpose to connect the companies of the Mercosur (Southern Common Market), a Regional Trade Agreement (RTA) among Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay, founded in 1991.

During that first stage, the results were not satisfactory at all due to the low bandwidth of the dial up internet connections, that could not provide more than 33 kbit/s. Since 2001, when ADSL technology became available in those countries, the second stage started achieving a good audio quality and getting better connectivity with no more audio breaks.

Technology used

Formerly, it run under an AIX platform on an IBM Rs6000 7248-43p with a RISK processor with 32 Mb Ram and 2 Gb hard disk. In 2001 a tentative to migrate everything to a Windows platform was not going well, and the group should need to stop trying because lack of funds.In 2004 the group started again, developing this time over a Linux platform, releasing finally the stable version 3 in late 2005.

Financing

The research was financed by several companies from the Mercosur as a global market strategy. In 1998, because of the lack of results, the financing stopped, and consequently the research stopped too until 2001. In spring 2001, the Argentine economic crisis made the country entered fully into recession. After the crisis, the country started a grow up period and trading motivated the continuity of the Call You Free project again, when the version 2 was released. Since that event, the project developing didn’t stop and finally, in 2005, the version 3 was released, together with the wide spread of the Linux operating system and the consequently grew up of the open source community.Currently Call You Free is becoming widely used thanks to CYF Foundation financial support.

Versions Released:
* protocol 0.1 b3 (1995)
* protocol 1 v.1 (1998)
* protocol 2 (2001) optimized for adsl and cable modem
* protocol 3 (2005)

See also

* Quality of Service
* SoftPhone
* VoIP
* WebCall

References

* [http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B01E6DD1E39F93AA25756C0A960958260&scp=1&sq=webphone&st=nyt The New York Times: Calling Long Distance, on a PC and the Internet]