Where are the big savings?

If you've been skeptical about IP telephony, you'll be glad to know carriers are now adding features that make it look more like regular corporate dialing plans. But then you'll probably choke on the price of the new features. And that calls in to question what was supposed to be the point of IP telephony - saving money.

Take, for example, a trial of IP telephony AT&T has under way called Connect 'N Save. Don't worry about the goofy name; it's really pitched at a broad consumer market. Besides, right now it's only available under trial in three cities - Boston, Atlanta and San Francisco. In fact, that's part of the problem - what if you live in one of those cities but you're not there when you want to make a call?

AT&T now says you can dial a toll-free number to obtain remote access. Well, as a network administrator, you probably already know the problems with "toll-free" access when it comes to anything Internet-related.

Just as ISPs will often charge additional fees when you use 800 access for your users' data sessions, AT&T charges extra for this nationwide voice IP access. The fee increases to 20 cents per minute from the otherwise 7.5- to 8.5-cent charge when you dial the nationwide number.

Of course, on regular calling plans your calling card rates are higher than toll rates when dialed from the office. So that 20-cent-a-minute rate is another thing that may make you say, "Tell me again why IP telephony is taking over the world?"

AT&T is adding other features as well, but they are merely catch-ups to features available over the public switched telephone network. For example, Connect 'N Save trial users can now place multiple calls without having to reaccess the service each time by punching in codes rather than hanging up. But that convenience has been available for a while on major carriers' regular calling plans.

AT&T is by no means the only carrier finding its costs for IP telephony aren't so inexpensive. ICG Communications, a competitive local carrier that went heavy into the IP provider business when it bought Netcom's 3,182-route-mile network, has introduced its IP telephony service in three states at the rate of 5.9 cents per minute.

But the rate only applies if you call within those states - in fact, you must call from one of the cities it supports to another. Otherwise, the off-net calls cost 8.9 cents.

Considering that Aunt Fanny probably doesn't have Internet telephony, and you can get 9-cent regular long distance from the major carriers just by signing up online, this doesn't seem like much of a deal.

The off-net problem has its parallel in enterprise nets in which users are experimenting with voice over frame relay or ATM for a theoretical cost of zero cents but have yet to figure out how to dial outside the company over the data infrastructure.

But it's the carriers that are making the claims that IP telephony is the great hope for toll avoidance in the future. There's a long way to go before these public carriers - IP or circuit-switched - can actually back up that claim.