Daily News 2004/11/25

SBC will provide domestic VoIP services in 2005

　　SBC, the second largest telephone company in America, plans to provide household VoIP services from 2005. It is mainly oriented to those American families who have both traditional telephone and broadband.

　　SBC says that in October, the company has provided VoIP test network in Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas and Texas. It is anticipated that such VoIP services will be available in 13 regions in America by 2005. More over, telecom operator, including Verizon and Qwest, will also join the team.

　　At present, AT&T and Vonage hold the major VoIP market share in America, with a monthly subscription fee of 25USD or less for VoIP service. SBC refuses to disclose the payment term for the VoIP services it provides. According to the analysis made by Yankee group, there will be 17.50 million families in America enjoying VoIP services by 2008.

NTT: Follow the VoIP trend

　　Like America, Japan is also a world leader in the field of VoIP. NTT, leading operator of Japan, in spite of the blows from IP telephone services in the early stage, is now making efforts to develop VoIP business to follow the trend.

　　The reason why VoIP service is so popular in Japan is that network services providers, such as SOFTBANK, took a positive way in competing with major operators, such as NTT. Soon after entering the network market, SOFTBANK provided ADSL and then IP services to gain as much benefit as possible in the field of network and telephone services.

　　Such action starts the race on the VoIP market. In 2003, one year after SOFTBANK begun to provide IP telephone service, the VoIP market in Japan has experienced the fastest growth. 40% of the broadband users in Japan have applied for IP telephone services. The dynamic growth of IP telephone service will surely have a great effect on the traditional telephone services.

KT will provide VoIP service next year

　　According to Korean medias, KT, the largest fixed telephone services operator in Korea, announced recently that it would provided multi-sides videoconference and e-learning services in the beginning of next year. With the access of KT to VoIP telephone market, the competition on the wire communication market will be turned from fixed telephone service to VoIP service.

　　According to Korea Information and Communication Policies Institutes, by the year 2010 the market value of VoIP services in Korea will be increased to about 35.3 billion CNY and the VoIP service will take the place of fixed telephone services.