VoIP season about to heat up

EarthLink, 3Com among those readying offerings.

September should be a big month for VoIP technology, with vendors expected to launch a host of offerings at a pair of big trade shows focused on converged networks.

With VoiceCon opening today in San Diego and Voice on the 'Net (VoN) scheduled for Sept. 19-22 in Boston, equipment makers and service providers are lining up in preparation for what analysts say will be a boom time for VoIP services.

According to a new Infonetics study, 40% of customers with broadband Internet connections also will buy VoIP service by 2008. That represents 24.3 million VoIP customers, up from 1.1 million last year, according to Kevin Mitchell, the Infonetics analyst who wrote the report.

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September should be a big month for VoIP technology, with vendors expected to launch a host of offerings at a pair of big trade shows focused on converged networks.

With VoiceCon opening today in San Diego and Voice on the 'Net (VoN) scheduled for Sept. 19-22 in Boston, equipment makers and service providers are lining up in preparation for what analysts say will be a boom time for VoIP services.

According to a new Infonetics study, 40% of customers with broadband Internet connections also will buy VoIP service by 2008. That represents 24.3 million VoIP customers, up from 1.1 million last year, according to Kevin Mitchell, the Infonetics analyst who wrote the report.

To support this anticipated demand, carriers are spending more, Mitchell says. Infonetics numbers indicate that voice providers spent 18% more in the second quarter of this year than in the first on VoIP gear, the largest quarter-to-quarter jump ever. The $614 million spent in the second quarter represents a 55% increase over the second quarter of 2004, the study says.

Service providers are now looking for ways to draw in customers with VoIP so they can then sell them more converged services down the road.

For instance, EarthLink is beta testing a free VoIP service that connects customers to any other Internet-connected VoIP phone. Called Vling, the service is based on SIPxua open source code from PingTel, and the alliance will be announced at VoiceCon.

As part of the VoIP service when it comes out of beta later this year, EarthLink plans to offer a limited number of free minutes of connection time to phones connected to the public telephone network. EarthLink hopes customers will like the service and be willing to pay for public switched telephone network connections after the free minutes run out, says Tom Hsieh, director of voice products and engineering for the company.

But Vling is more than just voice, Hsieh says. Using a single ID, EarthLink's Session Initiation Protocol (SIP )-based service can connect customers to e-mail and instant messaging, also provided by EarthLink.

By the year-end, EarthLink also plans to offer a cut-rate voice service in conjunction with DSL provider Covad that runs the voice traffic over their IP backbones to save on costs.

While analysts predict more VoIP services, they also foresee increased use of IP voice on corporate networks. The use of IP PBXs is poised to soar, according to a study by In-Stat that predicts sales of these devices will represent 51% of all PBX sales this year and grow to 91% worldwide by 2009.

Hoping to make hay on that trend, start-up Adomo is launching its first product, a voice mail system that integrates with Microsoft's messaging platform. Adomo Voice Messaging for Exchange hardware connects IP PBXs or traditional TDM PBXs with Exchange and Active Directory servers to create and store voice mail as audio files that can be retrieved from phones, PCs or handhelds.

The appliance enables users with PBXs made by multiple vendors to make a single connection to the Exchange server.