Some might remember a time when AT&T was American Telephone and Telegraph. Well, there's not much revenue coming out of the telegraphy business these days, and if you doubt telephony's going the same way, you're deluding yourself. What does AT&T become when two-thirds of its acronym is obsolete? If you look carefully, you'll can see some hints about the company's future in Network World's interview last month with AT&T CTO Hossein Eslambolchi and in the company's announcement that it soon will begin rolling out consumer VoIP services.

Some see AT&T's Concept of One as an indication that convergence is happening, that AT&T and other carriers will invest to migrate legacy services to IP. Baloney. What's happening is that native IP traffic and revenue are growing and justifying an IP backbone. If that backbone also can be made to support enterprise and voice services, the total cost of infrastructure is lower for AT&T. In the early phases, Concept of One really will be Concept of One More, meaning AT&T has to build out its IP infrastructure first and gradually absorb other service networks onto it.

Enterprise services with Level 3 features are absorbed more easily into the new IP backbone, and Eslambolchi has indicated that the AT&T backbone's IP traffic is substantially non-Internet. This enterprise traffic is partitioned from the Internet, a strategy that the other interexchange carriers are quietly adopting as well. Thus, it's clear that the Concept of One will segregate VPNs, the Internet and probably content traffic. Security for VPNs, now an encryption issue, will be automatic when VPNs are segregated from the Internet.

VoIP might be another of AT&T's market priorities, but AT&T would gain nothing by converting analog voice traffic to IP. The carrier's early motive is to dodge universal services and access payments, and converted voice would be treated the same as TDM voice. Instead, AT&T will use customer premises equipment to convert voice to an IP format, both for companies and consumers. That way, there's no incremental capital cost to put voice on the new backbone.

In the long run, carriers can't earn money on VoIP. You can do voice over broadband/Internet today without paying a nickel as long as your calling partners are similarly connected. That means AT&T's real goal with VoIP is to convert voice calling to multimedia IP calling over its Concept backbone. Watch how the carrier structures its service, and you'll see the hooks to add collaboration, pictures and video. Multimedia calling will end up costing as much as voice calling costs today.