THE FOLLOWING ANNOUNCEMENT IS 6 MONTHS OLD and THEY HAVE YET TO LIGHT UP ANY AREA CODES>>>>>>VERIFY>>>>>>>>
Im sorry but before the majors ever allow their customers to leave they will charge a lower rate and destroy this company and besides they have zero technology advantage... USAT..They dont have the money to build any of these PODS nor do they care
Located in san Diego...so i guess I will be visiting soon..
US ISP Announces Flat Fee Voice Telephony Network Plans
(08/24/98); 3:37 PM CST
By Steve Gold, Newsbytes
SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA, U.S.A.,
Steve Gold, Newsbytes. The worst nightmare of the telecommunications industry just happened. No, a major network didn't collapse, but a West Coast company has announced plans to build a national US Internet telephony network with a flat rate access fee.
That's right -- "all you can talk" for a flat rate a month. Coupled with the free local calls available in many areas, the end is now nigh for variable voice communications bills. Well, for some users anyway.
According to USA Talks.com Inc., the PhoneClub network will be the first to use the Internet to carry voice calls to normal phone lines at the other end, with unlimited service at a flat rate per month.
Allen Portnoy, the firm's CEO, said that the Internet service provider (ISP) is on schedule to offer its long distance phone service throughout the state of California by the end of next month.
"We expect to proceed across the country and 'light up' at least 34 major metropolitan areas, including approximately 60 area codes by the end of October 1998, giving us access to 75 percent of the US population," he stated.
According to Portnoy, the firm is able to offer long distance service by installing POPs (points of presence) across the US. "After the entire nation is covered, we will then move to international markets in 1999," he said.
To use the service, callers will not need a PC. Instead, users will simply dial a local number and vocally state the number they wish to call. USA Talks.com's voice dialer technology will then identify the the phone number and ID of the caller, and route the call to its destination across the Internet.
The use of voice recognition, Newsbytes notes, is clearly to avoid several users making use of the same account. The firm says that high ratio speech compression will be used to assure the quality of the call.
The big question facing the telecommunications industry and, indeed, the existing Net telephony firms such as RSL Com's Delta Three service (http://www.deltathree.com ) is how they can adapt to meet the massive threat that PhoneClub poses to them, Newsbytes notes.
For the telecommunications carriers, in the longer term, the solution seems to lie in concentrating on local loop calls, leaving long distance and even international traffic to the Internet and fax store- and-forward firms. In the medium term, however, competition will almost certainly come in the firm of value-added services which the carriers will charge for on a timed basis.
For companies such as Delta Three, however, which charges by the minute to many international destinations, a flat rate international PhoneClub service would blow them out of the water, except for smaller users, but Newsbytes' research to date suggests that low usage subscribers on Net telephony services do not make much profit for the Internet telephony firms.
Telecommunications carrier statistics have shown that the typical domestic phone line is in use for around 10 percent of the time in the US, with that figure doubling for business users, Newsbytes notes.
Given that a sizeable portion of that time is when people are asleep or not prepared to talk on the phone, Newsbytes estimates that -- in theory at least -- a service like PhoneClub could triple or even quadruple the volume of calls handled by the local loop, posing a very severe capacity problem for the local loop providers.
Such is the potential scale of the problem, Newsbytes notes, that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) would be almost certain to step in to regulate the market if a significant minority of phone users started using flat rate phone services like PhoneClub.
USA Talks.Com's Web site is at usatalks.com .
Reported by Newsbytes News Network, newsbytes.com .
15:37 CST
Reposted 23:06 CST
(19980824/Press Contact: Lesley R. Wilber, USA Talks.Com 619-546-0550 /WIRES TELECOM, ONLINE/WWWPHONE/PHOTO)
Copyright (c) Post-Newsweek Business Information, Inc. All rights reserved.
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