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Microcap & Penny Stocks : DIGITCOM (DGIV-OTC-bb)Information Thread -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: ~digs who wrote (380)	12/29/1998 9:08:00 PM
From: Zack Lyon	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 530

Voice-over-IP movement picks up head of steam By John Rendleman 12/29/98 12:00:00 AM A coalition dedicated to the interoperability of IP telephony gateway and gatekeeper products has signed on six new members and is on track to publish its interoperability guidelines this month. The effort, led by IP telephony services provider ITXC Corp. and equipment vendors Lucent Technologies Inc. and VocalTec Communications Ltd., is intended to extend the reach of IP telephony by allowing providers to originate and terminate calls among networks using multiple vendors' equipment, said coalition members. New members of the coalition, which will publish its "iNow Profile" guidelines later this month, include Ascend Communications, Cisco Systems Inc., Clarent Corp., Dialogic Corp., Natural Microsystems Corp. and Siemens Corp. The effort builds on previous work by Lucent and VocalTec, which have demonstrated that their IP telephony platforms work with each other and have agreed to publish their respective implementations of the ITU H.323 standard for transporting multimedia communications across IP networks. For IP telephony service providers, interoperability "has been one of the gating issues that's been on everybody's minds for the past year, and it's one of the things that has kept IP telephony from competing effectively with the public switched telephone network," said May Evslin, vice president of marketing at ITXC in Princeton, N.J. Without interoperability among gatekeeper products, a provider like ITXC has to perform many network management functions manually from its network operations center instead of relying on the gatekeepers to manage the network, Evslin said. In addition, interoperability is expected to dramatically boost the international IP minutes ITXC carries, currently in the millions of minutes per month, she said. Elsewhere on the VoIP front, wireless handset manufacturer Nokia Inc. recently entered the fray with its $90 million purchase of Vienna Systems Corp. of Kanata, Ontario. Initially Nokia will add Vienna's IP telephony technology to its wireless handsets; eventually it will begin producing multimedia phones with voice, data, fax and possibly video capabilities, said Nokia officials in Irving, Texas. The acquisition "will allow Nokia to put voice, data, fax and video [communications] over one IP infrastructure," said Dan MacDonald, vice president of marketing at Nokia IP Telephony, a new unit formed to include Vienna Systems. Nokia sees VoIP developing slowly in 1999 as a cost-cutting measure for internal calls made between company sites but building momentum in the corporate world in 2000, MacDonald said.