WINDOWS XP BRINGS NEW HOPE FOR VOICE OVER IP SERVICES

Microsoft's launch of its Windows XP operating system this week has the voice-over-IP industry anticipating a flood of new traffic from the company's inclusion of a voice-enabled MSN Messenger — despite some inherent limitations in PC-to-phone calls.

For exclusive analysis from the Voice on the Net show, check out Vince Vittore's exclusive column from our Weekly Update newsletter. Subscribe to our weekly e-mail newsletter.

Carriers and equipment vendors at last week's Voice on the Net show in Atlanta were thankful that a company with Microsoft's influence would endorse a product that could boost a market that is not meeting the outsized expectations established two years ago.

Earlier in the week, WorldCom, Telus, and U.K.-based Callserve Communications announced they would provide voice-over-IP services to XP users. Telus' and Callserve's services are aimed at the consumer market with calls over the public Internet; WorldCom is pinning its hopes on the enterprise market.

For the voice-over-IP industry, XP's introduction gives every desktop a SIP-based client that can be used to make PC-to-phone calls.

IMPACT PLAYER   Microsoft's consumer operating system evolution
Operating system	Ship date	Details
BASIC	July 1975	First OS for a PC
MS-DOS	August 1981	OS for IBM PC
Windows	November 1985	GUI interface for PC
Windows 95	August 1995	Web browser within OS
Windows XP	October 2001	SIP-based messaging

“The XP opportunity is an inflection point,” said Paul Duffy, CEO of Callserve, which hopes to offer service across Europe with the XP introduction. “Now you've got a substantial-sized business saying that VoIP is inevitable.”

While the ultimate effect of Microsoft throwing its weight behind a single client standard won't be known for some time, it's providing a big short-term boost to VoIP carriers.

“I can guarantee that on Oct. 25, the amount of SIP traffic will go up,” said Jawad Khaki, vice president of networking and communications for Microsoft's Windows group.

Microsoft hopes to have 240 million XP users within the next 15 months. While PC-to-phone calling has been considered a small niche, carriers entering the market early are putting their faith in the software giant's ability to move consumers to the service.

“The telcos have to sit up and take notice,” Duffy said. “Any one of them would cut off their right arm for the opportunity to grab 240 million customers.”

Meanwhile, WorldCom demonstrated a series of tools that will let enterprise users incorporate presence management through Messenger into a single communications package that amounts to a find me/follow me service.

“We're trying to tackle some of the hard problems early on,” said Teresa Hastings, director of multimedia services engineering for WorldCom.

Indeed, Microsoft also is hoping that its decision to support SIP will spur developers to create a slew of new services. It's a hope that isn't lost on the industry.

“Windows XP gives carriers a place to start,” said Jonathan Rosenberg, chief scientist for dynamicsoft and the author of the original SIP standard.

But not everyone is buying the hype. Several carriers at the show said the limitations of PC-to-phone calling are so great that even Microsoft's influence won't be able to overcome them — in particular the scalability of SIP-based services.

“The idea of signaling on a SIP network to support 25 million users hasn't been done before,” said Timothy Jasionowski, director of IP product incubation and strategy for Qwest's Internet solutions unit.

Such concerns are more of an excuse, said Duffy, noting that VoIP essentially is a data — not voice — service.

“When have you ever known a telco to do anything in data properly?”