I doubt very much that any sizable amount of QWST LD traffic is moving over the IP network. The problem is that the IP/PSTN gateways are not up to speed yet (specificially, the port density is still very low, and there are still problems with billing and features). The biggest players in this market from an equipment perspective are Lucent (who probably makes the best box), Cisco - who is still a little behind Lucent, but very aggressively pursuing this market, NORTEL, and a bunch of smaller vendors (QWST claims to be using the Vienna Systems boxes, which ride on a Pentium chip in a PC chassis, but I doubt very much these boxes are robust enough to handle voice traffic at any real magnitude). Anyhow, IMHO, there will ultimately be a shift toward more voice over IP on their network, but for now, the value of the LCI acquisition come from the higher margin to be had moving their voice traffic over the QWST circuit-switched fiber network - which is substantial.
As for 1+ VOIP, that's obviously the only way for VOIP to make business sense at high volume, and as soon as the boxes are there, I am certain we'll see more of that. |
