Net telephony grows on Time Warner
By Ben Charny
CNET News.com
October 22, 2003, 7:40 AM PT
zdnet.com.com
Time Warner Cable plans to expand its Internet phone service into three or four more cities by year's end, Time Warner Chief Executive Richard Parsons said Wednesday.
And next year, the company plans a "more aggressive" deployment of voice services, Parson said during a conference call with analysts. He did not provide specifics, such as what cities will be targeted.
The planned expansion of the voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) dialing plan would be the first since May, when Time Warner's cable division began selling a $40 a month VoIP dialing plan called "Digital Phone" in just one city, Portland, Maine.
"We've been aggressively testing it this fall and are pushing as hard as we can," said Don Logan, chairman of Time Warner's media and communications division.
Time Warner's decision to expand its Internet telephony offering is another indication that cable providers are the United States' biggest VoIP proponents. By selling phone services, cable providers have a much coveted "triple play"--voice calls, high-speed Web service and cable TV. Cable's biggest competitors are the major telephone companies, which for now sell voice calling and high-speed Web access. Most plan to add video in the future.
VoIP creates telephone service that relies on Internet connectivity rather than phone companies' proprietary networks. As a result, Net telephony providers are able to sell unlimited dialing plans at prices well below the rates most traditional telephone companies can offer.
Net telephony requires a network connection and a PC with a speaker and a microphone to convert analog phone signals into the Internet Protocol format. Some Internet phone services use existing home or office phones. After years of hype, the technology is finally garnering serious consideration from business and consumers.
Combined with similar offerings from cable providers such as Comcast and Cablevision Systems, major local phone companies across the country--sometimes called RBOCs (regional Bell operating companies)--are close to seeing the collapse of the last barriers to local phone competition. |
