GRIC picks up more support

The Global Roaming Internet Connection alliance is winning friends fast. The partnership, organized last year by software developer AimQuest to encourage Internet access and Internet-based faxing among international travelers, has grown from about 30 service providers late last year to 43 earlier this month.

"Things are happening fast. We are really extending our coverage," said Christophe Cuiline, vice president of marketing and sales at AimQuest.

Netcom On-Line Communications Services, a leading Internet service provider in the U.S., Canada and Brazil, is the latest carrier to join the alliance, said Cuiline. This means Netcom customers will be able to access the Internet through the networks of other GRIC members while traveling beyond their service areas, just by dialing their local access numbers and paying a roaming fee.

Likewise, Netcom provides GRIC with more than 400 points of presence in three countries by which other GRIC members and their customers can reach the Internet. Significant international GRIC partners include KDD of Japan, Singapore Telecom, EasyNet in the U.K., and several others.

Netcom gives GRIC its largest presence in the U.S. thus far, Cuiline said. But the roaming alliance also is talking to all of the Bell companies and other large U.S. service providers about signing on. "They will need to offer this type of service to their business customers. And Internet access is only the first layer of applications for this alliance," said Cuiline.

Indeed, AimQuest, creator of the AimFax Internet faxing software, is pushing GRIC as a global Internet faxing alliance (Telephony, Dec. 9, 1996, page 88). Internet faxing is growing in popularity, especially overseas where companies are looking to cut faxing costs.

Partnership hones in on Internet messaging NetXchange Communications and Dialogic Corp. have teamed to develop software and hardware for real-time messaging over the Internet. The software is intended to deliver voice or video messages, with fax capability anticipated for the second quarter of 1997. Intelect platform breaks bottlenecks Intelect Inc. demonstrated the CS4, an intelligent, programmable switching platform that uses an improved architecture to eliminate traffic congestion often seen in traditional hierarchical systems. The platform has 2016 port nodes that scale to more than 32,000 DS-0 ports and uses multichannel digital signal processing technology to increase processing power per port.