Estil Hoversten

Co-conceiver of the Internet Stream Protocol (ST), a connection-oriented complement to IPv4 notable for introducing the concepts of packetized voice, Hoversten has served as Senior Vice President of Hughes Network Systems, LLC from May 1992. He has been an officer of Hughes Network Systems, LLC and its predecessor organizations since 1978, with responsibilities at various times for business management, product development, strategic planning, and new business development. He also served as Assistant General Manager of North American Division at Hughes Network Systems, LLC from May 1992. Prior to that, he served at COMSAT Corporation in Clarksburg, Maryland, a company that created and was majority owner in the International Telecommunications Satellite Consortium (INTELSAT), an international satellite organization with the goal of global satellite coverage that today has 143 member countries and signatories.

Hoversten received his Bachelor of Science degree, Master of Science degree, and his PhD in Electrical Engineering from Iowa State University. He is a noted author on satellite communications technology. He co-authored with Stanley Rothschild, "Analysis of the ARPA Satellite Circuit Between Etam, W. Va., and Goonhilly, U.K. and Proposed Improvements to the Circuit Design."

First specified in 1979, Internet Stream Protocol (ST and later ST-II) was envisioned to be a connection-oriented complement to IPv4, operating on the same level as IP but using a different header format than that used for IP datagrams. According to IEN-119, Hoversten, along with Danny Cohen and James W. Forgie, conceived of its concepts. The protocol was notable for introducing the concepts of packetized voice (now Voice over IP), a talkspurt (a continuous segment of speech between silent intervals), and specified delay and drop-rate requirements for packet services. It was implemented in the Voice Funnel.

Internet Stream Protocol is a family of experimental protocols first defined in Internet Experiment Note IEN-119 (1979), and later substantially revised in RFC 1190 (ST-II) and RFC 1819 (ST2+). The Internet Stream Protocol family was never introduced for public use, but many of the concepts available in ST are similar to later Asynchronous Transfer Mode protocols and can be found in Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS). They also presaged Voice over IP.

ST arose as the transport protocol of the Network Voice Protocol, a pioneering computer network protocol for transporting human speech over packetized communications networks, first implemented in December 1973 by Internet researcher Danny Cohen of the Information Sciences Institute (ISI) as part of ARPA's Network Secure Communications (NSC) project.