LOOK WHO'S CALLING

When you are sitting on your couch watching your favorite TV show and the telephone rings, there's always a moment of indecision — is it a telemarketer, my brother calling for a quick chat or that crazy, unlucky friend of mine who likes to spend an hour on the phone venting about all of his problems? It would be nice of the characters on the show to just tell you who is calling, so you could decide if you wanted the interruption.

Technology hasn't come quite that far yet, but it's getting close. In fact, independent telcos have almost universally found that caller ID on TV is among the most popular services they can offer.

And vendors are responding with new iterations of the service. Integra5 recently released UniTV Visual Telephony Suite, which runs a scroll bar at the bottom of the TV screen. Others use pop windows.

Integra5's offering is among the first of what is expected to be a new generation of rich features and functions enabled by triple-play integrated service. Telcos all over the country are just beginning to realize the dream of triple play — or at least that's what the telcos themselves would tell you. But, in many cases, what carriers call triple play is nothing more than a single bill for all three services. It's not triple-play services on a single infrastructure and doesn't hint at the integrated features that would become available as part of a true triple play.

“Right now, for many service providers, a triple play means administrative bundling,” said Eyal Bartfield, president and CEO of Integra5. “It not the concept realized to its fullest potential.”

The 5-year-old vendor developed its UniTV Visual Telephony 2.0 suite based on requests from telco customers. Like other platforms, Integra5's allows digital video customers to view caller ID on their TV screens before the phone actually rings and to manage incoming calls using functions on their TV remote. The suite also allows picture notification of incoming calls, so every time your brother calls, you can see that photo of him throwing up at his bachelor party — or not.

Bartfield said that another key benefit of the service is that it is platform-agnostic, so it is not tied to a specific cable TV infrastructure technology or set-top box-maker. “The advantage of having our own network server is very important to the service providers,” he said.

Comporium, an independent telco in South Carolina with 10,600 customers, was the first service provider to offer Integra5's on-screen caller ID solution. The telco had not had on-screen caller ID in mind before talking to Integra5, but the utility and benefit of the solution quickly became clear, according to Glenn McFadden, executive vice president for Comporium.

“When we became more aware of it, we thought it was the type of solution that could give us something extra,” he said. “We thought customers would like the idea that you didn't have to get up and answer the phone to find out who was calling, and they really have.”

One of the biggest issues in rolling out the service is determining a price. For Comporium, it was an easy decision. “We don't charge for it. We view it as a retention tool,” McFadden said. Comporium offered the service free to digital cable TV customers, differentiating the company from the other digital cable competition in its territory.

“We also hope more people will buy digital cable once they hear about it,” he said.

Even though Comporium is giving away the service, McFadden figures that he had a payback time of only about 14 months on his investment in Integra5's solution.

Integra5 is soon looking to add other features to the suite, including call blocking and automatic diversion to voice mail. So far, the vendor's list of customers consists of small telcos in rural areas, but Bartfield said the company is trying to get the word out to larger potential customers. “We think this is something that could be useful for all kinds of telcos,” Bartfield said. “But the smallest telcos are often the first one to adopt something new like this.”