1995 - Opening Windows

Moving on 10 years we find the Telecoms Industry has become a feeding frenzy of Telecoms Resellers madly competing to sell Phone Systems, cheaper Call Minutes, Cheaper Phone Lines and System Maintenance to businesses. A lot of Resellers made a lot of money during this period, and a lot of Business Customers paid for it!

1995 was also significant due to the launch of Microsoft Windows 95. This heralded the era of "cheap" graphical computing and also "easy and cheap" networking standards for data.

However networking PC's together requires a lot more data transfer than for Green Screen terminals, so Modems became ever faster and it was but a short step to leased lines between Business Offices transferring data around the business.

It also became possible to link PC's to Telephone Systems and enable calls to be queued and handled - which led to Call Handling Centres and Call Centre Systems becoming cost effective for Telecoms intensive Businesses.

Also emerging was the idea of sharing Leased Lines between different Business locations for both Telecoms and Data traffic - Private Networks for Voice and Data. To make the sharing of Voice and Data bandwidth between sites more efficient companies started to break Voice calls into packets and feed the data packets into the voice stream - which eventually became Voice over Internet Protocol or VoIP.