In what it calls a major new initiative, AT&T plans to deliver VoIP services to business customers and consumers in 2004.
The company, which already serves hundreds of businesses with its managed VoIP services, expects to expand its VoIP portfolio and aggressively market a suite of VoIP-enabled services to business customers worldwide. AT&T will also roll out a new VoIP consumer offer in major cities across the United States in 2004, beginning with select metropolitan markets in the first quarter of the year.
VoIP, once considered a fallen-star technology, has recently seen a significant resurgence, starting with upstart Vonage Holdings Corp. and followed by new VoIP announcements from bigger companies like Qwest Communications, SBC Communications and others. Vonage, which offers best-effort voice over IP service to residential and small business subscribers, has whipped up a frenzy around VoIP in recent months. With 2,500 lines being added to its network every week, Vonage's base has surpassed 75,000. The company continues to add new markets, has announced comarketing agreements with a handful of small cable companies and recently won $35 million in new financing. “Vonage came along and essentially made the market real,” Tom Valovic, program director for IP telephony at research firm IDC, told XCHANGE last month. “The big buzz about Vonage is it fulfilled the promise that has been talked about in the industry for many many years – the potential to essentially disintermediate the telcos – cut them out of the loop.
“In response to Vonage, now large carriers are talking about a response,” he told XCHANGE last month. “I know AT&T is.”
AT&T Chairman and CEO David Dorman said the company is currently adding VoIP capabilities on the West Coast to complement its existing network facilities. When completed in the first quarter, this infrastructure will enable AT&T to provide VoIP services to consumers in the top 100 markets in the United States.
“Unlike many of our competitors, who are constrained by geographic reach or broadband access technologies, our voice over IP offer will be available in cities across America to customers with different kinds of broadband access,” says Dorman. “We will be deploying the best VoIP technology on the nation’s largest IP network, but we will be doing it with the most trusted and proven name in voice services.”
Dorman has created a new senior executive position to spearhead AT&T’s VoIP efforts across AT&T’s Labs, consumer and business divisions. Cathy Martine, currently a senior vice president in the consumer division, will occupy the new post.
AT&T says it already carries more IP traffic on its network than any other U.S. company. It began offering the VoIP service to select business customers in 1997. Just this year, the company has experienced a fourfold increase in the number of business customers using its VoIP services.
For consumers, AT&T has been running a customer trial of VoIP services since October in three states to test market a residential VoIP offering with enhanced information services, including advanced call-management capabilities and Web-based features.
The company explains that its strategy for IP-based services is driven by customer convenience and control over their communications, whether it involves telephones in their homes or a corporate campus with thousands of telephone stations linked to a PBX.
