Write any three applications of the Internet used in communication systems.
Answers
Instant Messaging:-
One of the fastest-growing forms of Internet communications is instant messaging, or IM. Think of IM as a text-based computer conference between two or more people. An IM communications service enables you to create a kind of private chat room with another individual in order to communicate in real-time over the Internet. Typically, the IM system alerts you whenever somebody on your buddy or contact list is online. You can then initiate a chat session with that particular individual.
One reason that IM has become so popular is its real-time nature. Unlike e-mail, where you will wait for the recipient to check his or her e-mail and send a reply, if a person you want to reach is online and available in your IM contact list, your message appears instantly in a window on their screen.
While IM is used by millions of Internet users to contact family and friends, it's also growing in popularity in the business world. Employees of a company can have instant access to managers and co-workers in different offices and can eliminate the need to place phone calls when information is required immediately. Overall, IM can save time for employees and help decrease the amount of money a business spends on communications.
Some problems and issues associated with IM include spim and virus propagation. Spim is the IM equivalent of spam and is perpetuated by bots that harvest IM screen names off of the Internet and simulate a human user by sending spim to the screen names via an instant message. The spim typically contains a link to a Web site that the spimmer is trying to market. Spim is a bit more intrusive than spam due to the nature of IM itself. These advertisements and junk messages will pop-up in your IM window and you need to deal with the messages immediately, where with e-mail you can usually filter a lot of it out and deal with it later.
Internet Telephony & VoIP
Internet telephony consists of a combination of hardware and software that enables you to use the Internet as the transmission medium for telephone calls. For users who have free, or fixed-price Internet access, Internet telephony software essentially provides free telephone calls anywhere in the world. In its simplest form, PC-to-PC Internet telephony can be as easy as hooking up a microphone to your computer and sending your voice through a cable modem to a person who has Internet telephony software that is compatible with yours. This basic form of Internet telephony is not without its problems, however. Connecting this way is slower than using a traditional telephone, and the quality of the voice transmissions is also not near the quality you would get when placing a regular phone call.
Many Internet telephony applications are available. Some, such as CoolTalk and NetMeeting, come bundled with popular Web browsers. Others are stand-alone products. Internet telephony products are sometimes called IP telephony, Voice over the Internet (VOI) or Voice over IP (VoIP) products.
VoIP is another Internet-based communications method which is growing in popularity. VoIP hardware and software work together to use the Internet to transmit telephone calls by sending voice data in packets using IP rather than by traditional circuit transmissions, called PSTN (Public Switched Telephone Network). The voice traffic is converted into data packets then routed over the Internet, or any IP network, just as normal data packets would be transmitted. When the data packets reach their destination, they are converted back to voice data again for the recipient. Your telephone is connected to a VoIP phone adapter (considered the hardware aspect). This adapter is connected to your broadband Internet connection. The call is routed through the Internet to a regular phone jack, which is connected to the receiver's phone. Special hardware (the phone adapter) is required only for the sender.