Steve Greenberg, CEO and Vice Chairman, Net2Phone

Steve Greenberg, CEO and vice chairman of Net2Phone www.net2phone.com, believes 2003 is the year voice-over-IP services will take off--despite projections that most players, including cable operators, won't move until 2004.

Everyone says that VoIP is at least 18 months out. What makes you think differently?

We have it right now. We're doing it with Liberty Media in Puerto Rico. It's our job now to spread the word, so it's not only good for us but it's good for the rest of this particular space.

But the big cable players--Comcast and Cox in particular--say it's not. Don't you need them to make your business go?

Somebody like Comcast, once they finish what they have to do administratively in terms of the merger [with AT&T Broadband], could put 300 engineers to work and have what we have within 18 months to two years. But others, especially the Tier 2s, can't afford to do that. Net2phone gives them a fully accessible, fully outsourceable, fully integrated solution that gives them top-line revenue at fabulous margins and at minimal capex.

So you're shooting lower than the top?

Truthfully, Comcast has been in our lab, and they're wowed by it; the question for them is do they come to Net2Phone to outsource or do they build it themselves?

So IP's the only way to go?

IP is the future. It has to be because there's no way you can offer a product of equal quality to a competitive product and sell it at a lower price. The only thing that can stand in its way is some regulatory or legislative scheme, and I don't see that happening within the next decade.