Covad readies VoIP launch

CHICAGO--

Less than a month after closing its acquisition of California voice-over-IP carrier GoBeam, Covad Communications is set to launch its nationwide packet telephony service. Covad officials at Supercomm 2004 today said Covad will be in 13 of its large markets by the end of the month and all 100 of Covad’s MSAs by the end of the year.

“We’re pretty much ready to go on the East and West Coasts and Chicago,” said Ed Mattix, senior vice president for communications and brand at Covad. “The network readiness is there. We’re now in the process of training our 3000 sales channels and hiring some additional sales management staff. Aside from that we’re set to launch.”

Covad will deploy the VoIP service over its SDSL and T-1 infrastructure, offering medium and small businesses virtual PBX and integrated PBX services. The strategy allows the carrier to target existing customers that don’t want to toss their public network circuit infrastructure by deploying a media gateway that communicates with GoBeam’s Broadsoft and Sylantro softswitches, or start anew, selling a fully managed IP Centrex service with Cisco handsets. Covad is also testing integrated access devices from different vendors for a future small office/home office offering.

Since the acquisition was announced last Spring, GoBeam has continued to sell its service in its California region, but over the last few months the two companies have been rapidly integrating their operations, expanding GoBeam’s network to a national scale and integrating the VoIP carrier’s back office and provisioning into Covad’s network operations center.

Covad intends to use the service to break away from the wholesale data model that has dominated its business since its creation, marketing VoIP and enhanced services directly to the SMB market. Covad, however, will sell the VoIP service to its wholesale customers and continue to support voice optimized loops, Mattix said.