but we're first.
by: selpamaxe (15/F/ohio) 1/25/00 11:44 pm
Msg: 18469 of 18472
"There are other people talking about doing these kinds of things, but we're first. We've taken the Internet and we've gone up a layer--we've created a service layer." -- Mark Hewitt, I-Link. Some industry analysts say they can see customer benefits because of I-Link's capabilities and national network. "The value here is time to market and resource availability," said Peter Nighswander, senior consultant at Current Analysis Inc. (Sterling, Va.). "Customers benefit by being able to hold down information technology (IT) costs and being able to provide these services in a timely manner. This is definitely the trend." Also, I-Link's national footprint gives them a edge on smaller companies looking to provide similar services, he said. "There's not going to be a whole lot of space here in the U.S. that doesn't have some form of direct I-Link connectivity to it," said Hewitt.
currentanalysis.com
The I-Link team came to an ambitious conclusion: the only way to offer the service customers wanted was literally to build their own Internet. In the past year, "unified communications" - the idea of routing all your communications needs through a single phone number or Internet device - became the latest buzz-word in consumer telecom. It's an enticing promise, but one that's been hard for the industry to deliver on because it presents a huge logistic challenge. Voice mail, pagers, email, video servers, cell phones, LANs, lines from the local phone company, broadband, cable, and more - all run on different platforms, creating an electronic Tower of Babel that makes it almost impossible (and prohibitively expensive) to unite them in one seamless system. Someone would have to invent a common electronic "language" that would allow these wonderful technologies to work together. Someone did. The language is called Internet Protocol (IP). The problem is that IP has to run on our 100-year-old system of switches that route telephone communications (including Internet messages) throughout North America. Slow spots in this network cause little delays, blips, and gaps in transmission that aren't noticeable in ordinary phone conversations, but are fatal in conference calls, faxes, or video transmissions.
?The Phillips Group-InfoTech undertook a comprehensive survey focusing on the impact
of IP telephony on the PBX market. Over two-thirds of the decision-makers indicated they
were ?very likely? to implement IP telephony over the next five years. The survey also uncovered that the demand for IP telephony existed across all market
segments ? there was little difference between small and large businesses. "You're talking about radical shift in the way voice is carried," said Bruce Kasrel, a telecommunications analyst with Forrester Research. "That doesn't happen overnight, especially in the telecom industry."
Kasrel said he thought it would be two to three years before most of the big telcos begin integrating voice IP infrastructures into their traditional networks, and that it would take another two to three years beyond that for substantial progress to be made.
Analyst sees $60 billion IP phone market
By John Borland
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
January 8, 1999, 4:45 p.m. PT
(copied from yahoo) |
