AT&T Vies for VoIP
The company announces improvements for telecommuters and travelers.
IDG News Service - Laura Rohde
There are some VoIP initiatives that AT&T is announcing . For example there is the pilot
project for the international VoIP remote worker and also a program designed for developing
basic standards for the Voice over Internet Protocol technology .
AT&T company has conducted some research in order to develop a marketing strategy . These
studies show that people are still concerned about the quality of this type of services and this
tends to drag down the sales .
The vicepresident at AT&T ,Jeff Ace , specialist in business developement , has made recently a
brief press announcement in London. He said that the company is trying to answer as many of the
customers questions as possible ,support intiatives that can be used in VoIP area and accelerate
future research .
Shooting for Standards
The pressure and competition has increased a lot in the area of conventional long-distance
business . As Jeff Ace said , AT&T thinks that the best way for the company to infiltrate into
new markets is by VoIP tecnology and its related products and services.
He declared the following : “We want to sell more bandwidth and more managed services in both
United States and international markets in order to make the access to data applications and
services easier.”
AT&T ’s company policy for developing the basic VoIP standards is to allow its partner
companies ( Siemens AG,Alcatel SA, Broadcom , Texas Instruments ,Nortel Networks,Cisco Systems
and Intel) to use the proprietary rights developed by AT&T to test the applications and
equipment for VoIP . The company’s vicepresident also said that these companies are also
collaborating with AT&T to develop a set of products for the VoIP market.
Remote Workers
AT&T has as a target both U.S market and some of the largest multinational companies and in
order to realise this they put some efforts in developing a VoIP pilot project for remote
workers .These planes involve 23 multinational corporations located in the United Kingdom,Hong
Kong, Australia and Singapore .When in June AT&T launched free trials , companies such as Air
Products and Chemicals,Global Exchange Service, Bausch and Lomb,BASF Australia, and VTech
Holdings from Hong Kong , all agreed and signed up to be part of the project.
AT&T expects in the first semester of next year thry will be able to be begin the commercial
offering of VoIP services for workers on the move , based on the so-called CallVantage Service
platform .The communications director at AT&T for Europe ,Africa and Middle East declared that
the company has some unresolved issues such as determining the costs and pricing.
Cheaper Telecommuting and Traveling
Remote workers can be either business travelers or people working from their own homes. The
VoIP services for them will include : e-mailing with integrated voice mail , global
teleconference features , and the no wireless global roaming taxes ,as an option for any such
user.
AT&T and the Economist Intelligence Unit have conducted some research regarding VoIP and the
conclusion was that the most important advantage for 87% of the corporations questioned is the
ability to cut back the costs for calling ,but on the other hand there is a serious question
mark regarding the quality of this service .
Quality Questions
Almost for all survey respondents the quality of VoIP service was the most significant concern.
On top of this ,the respondents already using or trying VoIP ( 67% ) were more concerned about
this issue than the ones who have’n yet implemented VoIP(64%) . The director of EIU global
technology research , Denis McCauley, says that “The fact that quality of service is a higher
concern among those who are already using VoIP makes us think that not all the problems have
been worked out yet” .
Generaly , users fear that VoIP service is not as safe of failures as the regular telephone
service .Other wuality problems are the delays and transmission interruptions as McCauley
stated.
Jeff Ace from AT&T believes in the quick developement of VoIP technology and says that problem
issues are permanently being resolved. Ace assures customers that for ” our network, you’re
guaranteed quality” but for a company using some other Internet provider is is more
difficult to be sure. Yhere is almost no congestion in the important parts but you can suffer
from in the access area .
Although there are many concerns about quality , research done by Economist Intelligence Unit
reveal that 43% of respondents stated that they are currently using or testing the VoIP
service .These ones plan on implementing VoIP sometime in the next two years ,but there are
some who plan to implement it in the long term ( about 18%).
VoIP Evolution
In the rapidly maturing market of VoIP the lines between competitiors are not extremly clear
because sometimes competitors are oftenly customers and or partners . Ace says that AT&T faces
“plenty competition” on the U.S market at also on international level .In spite of this ,IBM ,
one of AT&T most significant competitors , is said to be the company’s biggest customer on the
european market.
Hickey says that AT&T has expandend to 150 markets its VoIP services , in the United States area alone , starting since March . AT&T expects that until the end of 2005 they will reach a number of one million consumers and the company will add , as a plus
VoIP-enabled features for users of its VPN services and managed data communications.