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Quick talk about what's next

While taking its lumps in the financial markets, Level 3 Communications has been hit by rumors that it is reducing its services to a bare minimum. Ike Elliot, Level 3's senior vice president of global softswitch services, talked with Executive Editor Vince Vittore to separate fact from fiction.

On the perception that Level 3 has abandoned voice: We haven't exited our voice product at all. 2001 was a difficult year, and we were trying to improve our bottom line. What we did was a strategic review where we looked at our voice portfolio and asked, “Where do we want to put our effort?” We decided to do two things with our voice termination products: Originally, our voice termination product was focused on termination anywhere in the world. When we reviewed the product and looked at it from a true operating expense, we first decided to constrain our product to only North America. Second, we decided to focus upmarket on the product. We wanted to focus on large ISPs and carriers. We're no longer focusing on smaller resellers.

On product plans for 2002: In addition to the voice termination product, we did some experimental launches with IP voice. We've got a product called 3Voice origination that's going to allow telephone-to-IP-device calling. That can range from voice mail service to portal services to ITSPs that have SIP phones to prepaid calling card applications.

On offering a packaged product as Bell companies get into long distance: I think [Section] 271 approvals will increase the demand for that service. It's something we've talked about privately. We aren't doing any packaging with this, but several of our customers have expressed an interest in this.

On the effect companies like dialpad, Net2Phone and Zeroplus have on the softswitch/voice-over-IP market: In our customer set, we're seeing broad acceptance [of softswitches]. Verizon, Sprint and Qwest all said they would begin using softswitches. We're finally over the “Is it real?” stage. And while a lot of VoIP start-ups have gone out of business, the number of VoIP minutes has been growing. We carry over 10 billion minutes per month of local traffic. You're starting to see the hollowing out of the public network.