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Technology Stocks : Voice-on-the-net (VON), VoIP, Internet (IP) Telephony -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Stephen B. Temple who wrote (2077)	12/4/1998 11:07:00 AM
From: Frank A. Coluccio	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 3178

Stephen, Re: >>Telecom Consumers Pay More for Local Than Long Distance, Insight Research Reports << This is one of the impediments to domestic ITSP services whose gateway numbers and locations are sparsely situated. That is, those startup VoIP companies with less than ubiquitous reach that do not fit the regular public on-net [PSTN] model. Many of these are offering interstate rates south of 7 cpm, yet the tail sections between the customer and their closest gateway location (say, an Albany NY caller, who must access a gateway in NY City) may be as much as 50 cpm to 75 cpm due to local company (intrastate) calling charges. And don't try this from a coin booth. If the remote party is similarly situated in La Jolla, say, and their gateway is in SFO, you wind up with a coast to coast call that could conceivably be almost $1.50 to $2.00 per minute. Insanity. Many of these situations are being mitigated by toll-free 800 access on the calling party side, with the costs of those initial set-up calls being amortized by the ITSP in the cost per minute charges, or in some cases assessing minimums or monthly fees. But that only reduces the costs on one half of the equation, namely the calling side. Creativity at the remote geteway location is required by the ITSP at some point, using low cost T-1s between distant cities, and making arrangements for tandem office connections to a growing number of "qualified" locations. This requires a certain level of understanding and skills, and a decent amount of capital to afford. But as soon as you begin to resort to this form of networking, you begin to re-enter the domain of normal cost factors associated with non-ITSP topologies. And therein lies its own set of ironies. The remote costs are still dependent on the proximity of the called party to the closest gateway. Overall improvement rises as the number of gateway locations increases, and the distances between them narrow. As you can see, being a provider of proprietary and isolated network services, without peering privileges with other ITSPs, can become quite an expensive proposition, unless your targeted subscribers happen to all be inner-city dwellers and businesses in the nation's top dozen or so local calling areas. The other alternative is to hop aboard a ready-built overlay of POPs such as PSI has done on their own network, or some other such re-use of existing facilities that represents a near-ubiquitous reach. But those have their own set of problems too, similar to those encountered on any cloud... even if they do make special provisions with QoS eventually, and partitioned bandwidth. FWIW.

To: Stephen B. Temple who wrote (2077)	12/9/1998 8:56:00 AM
From: Stephen B. Temple	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 3178

CyberCall to Receive 1998 Product of the Year Award from CTI Magazine Business Editors & High-Tech Writers MINNEAPOLIS--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dec. 9, 1998--ATIO Corporation has announced that CTI Magazine, a leading authority in Computer Telephony has chosen CyberCall(R) 3.0 as 1998 CTI Product of the Year. Out of hundreds of products evaluated by Technology Marketing Corporation (TMC) CyberCall was selected for this award in the Call Center, Contact Center category. The award honors CyberCall's solid architecture and its capabilities to support interactions between customers and call centers via a variety of media. It is a comprehensive solution that is easy to configure to fit the needs of a customer-driven enterprise. "CyberCall 3.0 is the perfect solution for small and middle sized call centers" said Willem Ellis, CEO of ATIO Corporation. "This prestigious award confirms the message we have been receiving from trade analysts and our customers: CyberCall is the right product for companies that want to improve their business responsiveness by allowing their customers to contact them through various access routes. By being accessible via the media preferred by their customers, businesses can separate themselves from the competition." Today companies find themselves in an increasingly competitive world. It is no longer enough to compete on price and features. It has been proven by numerous statistics that to retain and attract customers companies must deliver outstanding customer service. CyberCall was created to enable companies to do just that. By the year 2000, it is estimated that 30-40% of all call center traffic will be initiated by means other than the telephone. With CyberCall 3.0 companies can offer both traditional telephone access for their customers and on the same platform providing e-mail, fax, interaction from the Web like callback, text chat, voice over IP and web collaboration. The result is responsive and personalized customer service across all media streams including automated services like Interactive Voice Response (IVR) and fax-on-demand. Whether a customer clicks on the CyberCall button on a web site, sends a fax, e-mail or uses the telephone to contact a business, the contact request is always routed to the most appropriate agent by the CyberCall Interaction Gateway. This All-media Automatic Call Distributor (ACD) selects the most knowledgeable available agent to respond and delivers the customer information to the agent prior to their first interaction. No wasted time asking unnecessary questions, repeating questions or worse, calls assigned to the wrong agent for the problem at hand. The result: rate of First Call Resolutions will increase, leading to a lower cost per call and higher customer satisfaction. The modular design of CyberCall allows flexibility in implementing a company's customer interaction solution. A business can start implementing the capabilities it needs right now, e.g. inbound telephone and IVR, and add other modules such as Web, fax, outbound dialing etc. when the need arises. CyberCall is easily configurable giving companies versatility in how each customer interaction is managed, and the ability to dynamically adapt to changes in their business. The built-in management tools provide central management and reporting of all call center resources: people and systems, even in multiple locations. Since all the access media and interaction handling resources are controlled from one point, it is possible to build business rules to automatically handle the allocation of the most valuable resources to the customers representing the highest value to the business. CyberCall runs on Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) NT servers and supports clients on Windows 95, 98 and NT. Telephony functions are provided via CT-Connect, CT Media and hardware from Dialogic Corporation (NASDAQ: DLGC). ATIO's standard turn-key solution includes servers from Compaq (NYSE: CPQ). For information on CTI Magazine and TMC visit www.tmcnet.com. More information about ATIO and CyberCall can be found on the company's web site at www.atio.com.