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Voip makes telco inroads
http://www.sina.com.cn 2005/04/20 18:34  Shanghai Daily

  Before business trips, Suneet Tuli used to leave behind a long list of numbers where he could be reached and told important clients to ring him on his cell phone. The routine was cumbersome and cost him about US$800 a month in phone bills.

  Now, he has local numbers for New York, London and Mexico City despite no permanent presence in any of those cities. The lines automatically forward to another number that seamlessly transfers to a cell phone with the best rates for wherever he happens to be.

  Because Tuli's calls are routed mainly over the Internet instead of the traditional voice network, he can make changes to the elaborate setup simply by visiting a Website. And he's cut his phone bill by about 80 percent.

  "Even though it seems complicated, in my mind it's all straight," said Tuli, chief executive of DataWind Inc, a Montreal company that makes handheld Internet-browsing devices.

  Tuli is in the Voice-over-Internet vanguard, relying on a technology transforming what it means to make a phone call by converting our conversations into little packets of data that traverse the Internet.

  After a decade of promises about how it would forever change communications, Voice over Internet Protocol, or VoIP, is beginning to nudge the 130-year-old traditional phone network to obsolescence.

  It's inexpensive and, beyond mimicking traditional telephony, makes possible a range of new digital revolution-bestowing features and flexibility that people like Tuli are seizing on.

  Yet the fact that Voice over Internet relies on data networks is both its greatest strength and biggest liability. Because it piggybacks on top of existing services, companies offering it need not dig up streets, roll trucks to homes or pay the same amount of regulatory fees as traditional telcos.

  VoIP's features and low costs come paired with questions of reliability and regulation that the industry and government are only beginning to address. And you need a broadband Internet connection, which is far from ubiquitous though more than half of US households that go online now have one.

  Mainly marketed as a supplement or replacement for traditional phones, VoIP is already used by millions worldwide, most of them in Japan. In the United States, the numbers are expected to grow from about 3 million today to some 27 million by 2008.

  Tuli says the quality of the VoIP calls has improved dramatically since he first tested out Internet telephony. "Today, most people who call me have no idea," he says.

  (The Associated Press)


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