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To: Just_Observing who wrote (3253)	3/17/1998 1:59:00 PM
From: pat mudge	Respond to of 6180

News from CeBIT: If it's Deutsch Telekom, it's probably Siemens, and if it's Siemens, it's TI. <<< D.Telekomplans mass Net phone, ADSL launch Reuters Story - March 17, 1998 11:40 By William Boston HANOVER, March 17 (Reuters) - German telecommunications giant Deutsche Telekom AG on Tuesday unveiled plans for a broad launch of Internet-based telephony services and high-speed ADSL digital lines for residential and business customers. Telekom made a first step towards devloping Internet phone products last year by taking a stake in market leader VocalTec , an Israeli technology company, and has conducted several pilot projects to test products. Now company officials said the time has come to take Internet telephony out of the laboratory and into the market. "We are going into the mass market in the autumn," Detlev Buchal, Telekom board member for sales and distribution, told a news conference ahead of the CeBIT technology fair. He gave no details about pricing. Using software products such as VocalTec's "Internet Phone," Net surfers have turned the global computer network over the past few years into a cheap alternative for making long distance phone calls. Because of its structure, the price of an Internet call is always the cost of a local phone call, regardless of whether the caller is speaking to someone across the street or around the world. Telekom is one of the first major telecommunications companies to get behind Internet telephony in a big way. "I don't know of any telecommunications company that is moving as aggressively here as we are," said Telekom chairman Ron Sommer. "We are methodically creating the technologically conditions to expand Internet telephony into innovative applications," he added. Sommer said recent speculation that the company planned to invest billions in Internet telephony was overdone. "There were a few too many zeros attached," he said, but declined to give specific figures. Sommer said the company did not expect Internet telephony to pose a danger to its core business, but that it would compliment its business by added a low-cost alternative. "It is like an airline that offers business class, first class and economy class," he said. "We also want to expand into economy class." For determined Net surfers and big businesses hungry for network speed, Telekom plans to accelerate development of asynchronous digital subscriber line (ADSL) technology. ADSL allows high-speed digital transmission of data over normal copper wires at a much faster rate than existing Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN) and makes such services as video-on-demand possible. "ADSL is the next step we plan to take," said Buchal. "In the long-term we see this as a mass market application because even residential customers are demaning broadband capacity." Telekom is the world leader in deployment of ISDN, which can transport up to 64,000 bytes per second in one channel and can combine channels to increase bandwidth. In Germany, there are over 7.6 million ISDN channels installed and widely used in business and at home. The basic monthly charge for an ISDN line is below the price of two conventional telephone lines, but calling charges are the same. When asked about how Telekom planned to price ADSL services, Buchal said the current high price level for ADSL services would likely fall in accordance with rising demand, just as had been the case with ISDN. He urged the telecommunications regulator, however, not to enforce a price that was too low too early in the development of ADSL. "One must position this product in the market at market-oriented prices," he said.>>>>