Bell Moving Further Into Internet Telephony
[[All, also see today's other Canada story, this time re Deutsche Telekom Canada, at:
Message 5641034
...from the VOCLF thread.
Regards, Frank C.]]
September 1, 1998
MONTREAL--(BUSINESS WIRE) Bell Canada today
augmented its growing portfolio of communications
services offered over the public Internet with the
introduction of an international fax service based on
Internet Protocol (IP). At the same time, the
company announced the launch of trials of an
international long-distance voice service, also based
on Internet Protocol.
The advent of such capabilities is part of an industry
trend known as Internet Telephony. "Bell Canada is
committed to delivering leading-edge products to all
segments of its customer base," says Josee
Goulet, Group Vice-President, Markets and Sales -
Ontario.
"Through our Emergis division, Bell is a major player
in the growing area of Internet Telephony and is
dedicated and plans to bring a number of leading
services - such as voice and fax over IP - to the
marketplace. We are committed to developing
products that give us competitive strength both
terms of features and of price."
Fax Over IP
The fax service, mainly designed for small and
medium-sized businesses, will be initially available
from Toronto and Montreal to London, England and
Paris, France, and will be expanded to include a
number of other cities in Europe and Asia. The
service currently supports fax-to-fax and
e-mail-to-fax and will eventually support PC to fax,
fax to PC, fax to e-mail and broadcast fax.
Voice over IP
The trial of voice service over IP between Toronto to
London has been in place since August 10, and will
be made available between Montreal to Paris in late
September.
"The purpose of the voice trials, which are expected
to run for two months, is to gauge customer
demand and generate feedback on the value of the
service," says Goulet. "This will include seeking
customers' opinions on the quality and reliability of
the service. Our goal is to explore this new
environment and gain the insight we need to develop
products and services for this market."
"We are able to provide these leading edge services
through the partnerships we've built among Bell
Canada, Bell Emergis and Nortel," said Jim Tobin,
CEO of Bell Emergis.
Today's announcement follows a similar initiative
earlier this month when Bell announced a voice and
fax over IP service for medium and large customers
using their internal Intranet network.
Bell Canada, the largest Canadian
telecommunications company, markets a full range
of state-of-the-art products and services to more
than seven million business and residential
customers in Ontario and Quebec. Bell Emergis is
the network-centric application development division
of Bell Canada. Formed in July 1997, it represents a
commitment by Bell Canada unique within the
worldwide network services sector to harness next
generation internetworking environments to deliver
rich, software-intensive capabilities to businesses,
consumers and other carriers.
CONTACT: BCE Inc. | Don Doucette, 514/786-3924
| bcecomms@bce.ca | URL: bce.ca
[Copyright 1998, Business Wire] |
