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Technology Stocks : VocalTec (VOCL) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Don Walster who wrote (1629)	7/1/1998 5:56:00 PM
From: Dan Markel	Respond to of 2349

By Alan Tillier, TechWeb France's largest telecommunications operator has stepped up its research into Internet-based telephony after a new company promised to start an IP-based telephony service in France within the next month. France Telecom, the country's largest telephone company, which, until recently, rejected IP telephony, said it will be doubling its research efforts to enter the IP telephony market as soon as possible. RSL Communications, a Bermuda-based telecom provider, said it will launch a voice-over-IP service in France in July. Instructions have been sent to France Telecom's research laboratories to find high-grade Internet voice solutions quickly. France Telecom has research operations in Brittany, Western France; and a new one in Brisbane, Calif., part of Silicon Valley. RSL is ready to roll out IP telephony services in France in July, said Xavier Brugere, marketing director of RSL, in France. "Our subsidiary Delta Three will be offering IP telephony for carriers and firms -- phone-to-phone and PC-to-phone for users such as students," Brugere said. RSL's standard phone rerouting services are used by 2,000 French companies. These companies will be able to link their phones into the worldwide intranet operated by Delta Three. RSL said it plans to merge Internet and standard telephony-switch technologies in different areas around the world. Two years ago, France Telecom announced publicly that "networks like Internet are not adapted to voice transmission." But last month, Jean-Jacques Damlamian, executive director of FranceTelecom's development branch, told the company's telecom engineers, "Real voice over Internet may not be for tomorrow, but voice over intranet is for the near future, and this is why we have to work on it." Last Friday, Damlamian said France Telecom is "now acting firmly because studies show that around 15 percent of [voice] traffic could go over the Internet by the years 2001 and 2002. This could represent a threat affecting our activities. We want to turn it into an opportunity." France Telecom, he said, now had its own active internal IP network for testing purposes. The company is working with German telco Deutsche Telekom. The Germans, in turn, are working with IP-telephony equipment vendor Vocaltec, of Israel. The immediate development is likely to be fax by intranet, said Damlanian, then intranet voice and ultimately Internet voice. "My concern is that voice quality over intranet and Internet should be of the highest quality, but the marketing people may want to go quicker," he said. After debuting its technology last year in the United States, RSL signed an IP telephony agreement in January with Nifty, the largest information service provider and ISP in Japan with 2.5 million customers. New agreements were announced in the United Kingdom in April and in Finland in May.