Another Germany Story - Deutsche Telekom Unveils PC-To-Phone Service
[This one is an ASND PR, apparently, and therefore does not mention VOCLF. But there's something to be said about that. And this does not appear to be a pilot or trial, as others have been in the past.
As Germany leads the way with cheap IP traffic, with others in EU to follow, most assuredly, what does this say about the international accounting/settlement rate advantages that domestic US ITSPs currently realize, going forward? Frank C.]
August 31, 1998
DARMSTADT, GERMANY, Newsbytes via
NewsEdge Corporation : After an astonishing
turnaround half year that has seen Deutsche
Telekom (DT) shed its lumbering state carrier status
and seemingly reinvent itself, the company has
now launched itself into the IP (Internet Protocol)
telephony marketplace.
Building on early trials held earlier this year, DT has
announced it is rolling out a new PC-to-Phone
service for German Internet users. Users need to
use their Windows PCs, equipped with microphone
and speaker, and DT routes the call across the
Internet and outdials at the distant country to an
ordinary phone line.
DT's service is not as revolutionary as some of the
phone-to-phone services seen in the US, such as
those from ICG Netcom and RSL Com/Delta Three,
but the new service is revolutionary for Germany, a
country which has been legendary when it comes
to high telephone rates.
Only a couple of years ago, for example, Cable &
Wireless established inbound dial points across
Germany, routing calls via London, and back to
Germany, at rates cheaper than DT charged for a
city to city call within Germany, Newsbytes notes.
All that has changed this year, however, as
European Commission (EC) mandated open market
rules mean that almost all comers -- subject to
licensing requirements -- can now offer telephone
services in Germany. And now DT is fighting back
on the discount calls front.
The DT Voice-over-IP (VoIP) is being publicly
trialed among 1,000 of DT's T- Online Internet
service at the moment, using Max hardware from
Ascend. Plans call for the service to be rolled out
across Germany later this year -- assuming all goes
well with the commercial trial.
The T-Online VoIP service allows German PC users
to place outgoing calls to foreign (i.e. non-German)
destinations -- subscribers simply dial via a
multimedia PC, which converts the call into IP
packets, and the call is automatically routed to the
nearest Deutsche Telekom point of presence (PoP).
At the given destination -- for example, New York --
DT's VoIP gateway, equipped with Ascend's Max
6000 wide area network (WAN) access switch,
converts the IP packets back into voice and
forwards the call to the public network.
Newsbytes understands that the PC-to-Phone
service offers connections from Germany to
Austria, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Switzerland,
Australia, Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore, the UK,
and US.
T-Online's Web site is at t-online.de .
Reported by Newsbytes News Network,
newsbytes.com .
(19980827/Press Contact: Eric Warren, Ascend
Communications 510-747-6683; Deutsche Telekom
press office +49-228-181-4949 /WIRES TELECOM,
ONLINE, BUSINESS/)
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