VoIP volleys

What a week for VoIP. Several major players made major moves in packet telephony with service rollout announcements and agreements to broaden service footprints. But the real action won’t begin until next year.

What a week for VoIP.

Several major players made major moves in packet telephony with service rollout announcements and agreements to broaden service footprints. But the real action won’t begin until next year.

Chief among them was AT&T’s disclosure that it will significantly broaden its consumer voice-over-IP (VoIP) offerings next year. The carrier has offered VoIP services to some business customers since 1997, but the carrier now plans to expand its VoIP business services worldwide and begin offering new services to U.S. consumers.

AT&T said it will start rolling out consumer VoIP services in select U.S. cities in the first quarter of 2004 with an eye on targeting consumers in the top 100 U.S. markets.

That will pit it against Qwest, which has already turned up service to 200 homes in the Minneapolis-St.Paul area. Qwest appears to be the first regional Bell operating company to offer consumer VoIP – like AT&T, the three others don’t plan on rolling out consumer service until next year.

VoIP in the Twin Cities is the first of a phased deployment for Qwest. The RBOC plans to provide VoIP services to additional residential and small-business customers as well as to midsize and enterprise business customers during the first half of 2004.

With its VoIP offering, Qwest hopes to keep customers from jumping to an alternative provider, such as a multicable system operator (MSO). Speaking of which, one of the more aggressive MSOs in packet telephony, Time Warner Cable (TWC), made some significant moves of its own to expand its VoIP footprint.

TWC announced wholesaling agreements with MCI and Sprint that will enable the MSO to offer VoIP in most U.S. markets by the end of 2004. TWC introduced VoIP services in parts of Maine and North Carolina earlier this year.

MCI and Sprint will move TWC’s IP voice traffic to the public switched telephone network, provide long-distance carriage, and deliver enhanced 911 service and local number portability.