AT&T launches IP telephony services

AT&T announced today that it is launching end-to-end voice over IP for its U.S. enterprise customers in 2004 and will extend its global network to 40 more countries by the end of that year.

While it will initially target the domestic voice needs of U.S.-based companies and government agencies, the multinationals are the key driver to the VoIP rollout. AT&T quickly plans to accelerate its global rollout, according to Joe Airbinder, product marketing director for AT&T’s VoIP business services.

“The big globals are very anxious for this service,” Airbinder said. “We’ve been under a lot of pressure from them to offer voice over IP.”

AT&T has yet to name its softswitch vendor and the suppliers of AT&T’s basic VoIP architecture could change before the official rollout, Airbinder said. The company is seeking softswitches that can handle TDM and IP traffic.

The VoIP service will hook directly into AT&T portfolio of managed services, including the IP PBX offering AT&T launched last year. AT&T will offer VoIP to remote sites as small as those with only a 64 kb/s connection all the way up to corporate headquarters. The traffic will all hit AT&T’s new multi-protocol label switching core, which will prioritize voice traffic over all data.

Airbinder said AT&T expects customers to take up the VoIP services progressively, starting with a few pilot sites and then moving to large offices and headquarters that produce the most international traffic onto the IP network. Companies will then most likely start filling in their more remote sites gradually.