Daily News 2005/04/08

AOL to provide VoIP service, for registered subscribers first

On Monday (Local time, America), America Online (AOL) announced that it would provide the quotation and relevant details on the VoIP service later this week, probably on Thursday. At the end of last month, it announced a plan for VoIP service.

Sigma's products supporting Rogers's VOIP business

Sigma announced today that Rogers, the largest cable TV provider in Canada, would adopt its OSS products to support the digital telephone service and other voice/data services. Rogers plans to provide such digital telephone service in the mid of 2005. It has adopted Sigma's products ever since 1995. The business management platform of Sigma is now serving 950,000 broadband users of Rogers. This time Sigma will upgrade the management platform for the VoIP service. It will provide VoIP business, CLEC internal gateway, VoIP diagnosis tools and many other products.

There will be 27 million VoIP users in America in 2009

According to the data released by IDC (a market research company) on Monday (Pacific Time, America), the number of household Internet telephone service subscribers in America will increase from 3 million (in 2005) to 27 million in 2009.

IDC points out that with the traditional telephone operators setting foot on the Internet telephone market, household users will take the lead on the VoIP market. VoIP has finally changed the trend of slow development that has lasted so far.

According to IDC, although the Internet telephone service, due to the lower cost, is attracting more and more people, it is still quite necessary for the operators to introduce the functions and characteristics of such service to the customers to avoid a price war. This means that there will be an integrated service on the market in the future.

Although the traditional telephone operators and professional VoIP operators such as Vonage have entered into the VoIP market, service providers, including cable TV operators, will provide customer-oriented products and service too.