Comcast’s VoIP Rollout Looks To Replace Carrier Voice Service

Cable giant will make service available to 40 million homes by 2006

If there was any doubt that the battle for the consumer communications market was going to be momentous, Comcast’s recent announcement of its VoIP rollout plans should dispel the remaining uncertainties. The plans amount to a declaration by the nation’s largest cable and broadband provider that it’s going after 40 million phone customers that currently belong to traditional telcos. The telcos are proceeding with their plans to fight back, but they’ll have their hands full.

According to the announcement, Comcast will offer VoIP service over its cable infrastructure in 20 markets encompassing 15 million homes by the end of this year, and in all of its current markets, covering some 40 million homes, by the end of next year. And unlike the VoIP-only providers, which often provide a second line with cheap long-distance calling that supplements consumers’ primary phone service, the cable giant hasn’t the slightest thought of peaceful coexistence with the rivals it’s targeting.

"The vast majority of our customers are going to take us for all their home phone services," says Tom White, marketing vice president for Comcast voice services. "We’re not really positioning this as a second-line product, but more as a replacement service or a whole-home solution, so people are dropping their existing providers to port their numbers to Comcast."

By: Robert Poe
America’s Network

Full Story: http://www.americasnetwork.com/americasnetwork/article/articleDetail.jsp?id=165236

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VoIP Quality Needs Improvement, Says Keynote Study

Business Wire via NewsEdge Corporation

New competitive intelligence from Keynote Systems (Nasdaq:KEYN), The Internet Performance Authority(R), reveals the need for considerable improvement in overall service quality from the leading providers of Internet telephone service (VoIP). The results of the Keynote VoIP Competitive Intelligence Study, the first of its kind to benchmark and rank the quality of VoIP as perceived by end-users were released today. For the study, Keynote ranked six leading VoIP providers on critical performance factors that influence the end-user experience using Keynote’s VoIP Perspective measurement service.

Included in the study were AT&T CallVantage (NYSE:ATT), Packet 8, Primus Lingo, SkypeOut, Verizon Voicewing (NYSE:VZ) and Vonage in the New York and San Francisco metro areas. To understand the impact of underlying network performance on call quality, the VoIP telephone calls were carried on three business-class networks: AT&T, Sprint (NYSE:PCS) and UUNET. In addition, the study captured the impact of the last-mile on call quality by measuring each of the six providers on residential DSL lines from SBC (NYSE:SBC) and Verizon and residential cable lines from Comcast (Nasdaq:CMCSK) and Time Warner Cable (NYSE:TWX) as well.

Full Story: http://www.americasnetwork.com/americasnetwork/article/articleDetail.jsp?id=170363