DENVER — In a year-end claim-staking stampede, carriers from the cable TV, local phone exchange and long-distance worlds are scrambling to make announcements pledging customer support for Voice Over Internet Protocol service in 2004.
AT&T Co., Time Warner Cable and Qwest Communications International Inc. were among companies detailing 2004 VoIP offerings this week. The promised rollouts reinforce how important the notion of "triple play" — a single service that provides voice, data, and video — is to both CATV multisystem operators and the local and long-distance markets.
VoIP trials have varied considerably in how they will packetize voice, with few carriers ready to move directly to an IP-based client using the Session Initiation Protocol, or SIP, in phones or PCs. Instead, most services will use existing analog handsets, converting to packet at an aggregation gateway.
Even this partial offering carries immediate benefits, as in the case of AT&T, which can offer flat-rate service for both local and long-distance by transporting all voice traffic as packets. One financial analyst who covers AT&T said "the first impact will be to create more vicious competition between interexchange and local carriers, with prices dipping so low [that] some carrier operating expenses could suffer. The second impact will be to hammer the specialized long-distance providers who use a leased interexchange carrier. Without direct access to transport, they wont be able to meet the VoIP challenge."
Time Warner has signed a three-way deal with Sprint Corp. and MCI Communications (formerly WorldCom), in which the two long-distance carriers will provide the IP transport between Time Warner headends across multistate regions.
Qwest will offer VoIP service in Minnesota, using either IP phones or analog phones with adapters, linked to DSL modems. The service, already available in some Minneapolis-St. Paul neighborhoods, will be expanded to most of Qwest's 14-state region in the first half of 2004.
Finally, AT&T announced it would offer IP-based local and long-distance phone service to its customers with broadband access, enabling most services within 2004.
