Hearing IP voices everywhere

One measure of a technology's maturity is its tendency to spread beyond its early boundaries. If that's so, IP voice passed a few minor milestones last week with two novel applications.

ITXC's webtalkNOW! service, aimed primarily at ISPs and Web portals, allows end users to make Web-to-phone IP calls over the Internet entirely transparent of ITXC's brand on the service. The company supplies the necessary Web client software, which can be branded by the customer portal or ISP, and will accept ad placements for additional revenue.

"Portals were telling us they want to add Web-to-phone calling to attract not only eyeballs but eardrums to their site and to keep people there for the duration of the call," said Tom Evslin, ITXC's chairman and CEO. "They see this as the natural supplement to portal-supplied e-mail. There's probably been nothing as sticky in the history of the Web as e-mail addresses. Communications services are a way to keep people coming back to the same site."

The product gives Web portals faster time to market with IP calling, Evslin said. "It's the `now' in webtalkNOW! that's most important," he said.

The company rolled out the product to one provider, MediaRing.com, on an ad hoc basis last December. Last week, Evslin announced that the company had two more customers. Dialpad.com will use webtalkNOW! for some of the free, ad-supported IP call services it offers to its 3 million users. And unified messaging wholesaler Onebox.com will offer webtalkNOW! as a premium service through its ISP customers to some 2.5 million users. Onebox.com and ITXC also will enter into joint marketing efforts to wholesale their services to ISPs as an integrated communications package.

ITXC became good enough at wholesaling phone-to-phone via the Internet that the Web-to-phone offering seemed a natural extension of their product line, Evslin said. "We have specialized in carrying voice traffic over the Internet," he said. "Our BestValue routing technique steers packets away from Internet congestion and public [network access points]. Net2Phone and deltathree.com use a private IP network because they haven't mastered the technology of getting the carrier-grade quality over the Internet that we have."

The week's biggest news came in the cable arena, with Rogers Communications' purchase of Groupe Videotron for $4.15 billion to form Canada's largest cable and Internet corporation. The deal will have clustering effects - Videotron, with market concentration in Quebec and Ontario, Canada, will give the merged company a footprint similar to Bell Canada's.

But much of its impetus apparently came from the logic of combining Rogers' experience in interactive TV and high-speed Internet with Videotron's expertise in IP voice over hybrid fiber/coax cable. That's evidenced by the 50% premium that Rogers offered for Videotron's shares, even though the number of homes passed is comparable - 2.8 million for Rogers, 2.3 million for Videotron.

Videotron has been testing cable IP phone for more than a year and plans to roll out the service in the Montreal market this summer. The company received competitive local exchange carrier certification early this month. It has interconnected with Bell Canada and can provide emergency services and local number portability.

"We have completed all the external testing and gotten the gateways working on the network," said Claude Chagnon, Videotron's president and CEO. "We're now beginning to test all the business processes, customer activation, billing and so on." Chagnon will become vice chairman of the merged company.

"I felt there was no point in Rogers duplicating the Videotron work," said Ted Rogers, president and CEO of Rogers. "The world is moving to bundles, not to single products. This deal allows the combined group to offer more new products and more services more quickly than we could do separately."

As for the timing of a mass rollout of cable IP phone, Rogers repeated an earlier prediction: "I will stick to my July 1, 2001 [target date] until I'm educated about an earlier date."

In addition to Canada's largest cable operation, Rogers owns 51% of the country's largest wireless network, Rogers AT&T Wireless.

Assuming it receives regulatory approval from the Canadian government, the Rogers/Videotron deal is expected to close in April.