Summary
Voice over IP (VoIP) telephony is expanding in Germany, with dozens of companies now offering inexpensive internet telephone service that costs either almost nothing or one or two cents per minute, depending on whether the call must go to the German fixed-line system. Deutsche Telekom is ramping up its own VoIP services to protect its customer base.
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http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,1564,1514906,00.html
Details
Dozens of exhibitors at CeBIT, the world's largest IT fair, which opened in Hanover on Thursday, are ready to outfit consumers with headsets, switchboards, phones and answering machines for the day when Voice Over Internet Protocol (VoIP) replaces analog and ISDN phone lines.
After subscribing to a particular service, users can usually call within that network for free and calls to the German fixed-line network normally costs between one and two cents a minute.
The Hamburg Internet provider Freenet has even done away with those costs for some of its VoIP packages.
Germany currently has about six million people using DSL connections to access the Internet and 330,000 of them are taking advantage of their high-speed connections to make telephone calls, according to the Association of Telecommunications Providers.
"DSL is the technology that made voice over IP possible," said Karsten Krug of AVM, the producer of the widely popular FRITZ line of devices used to connect computers to high-speed Internet services.
Transferring phone calls to the Internet could spell trouble for Deutsche Telekom, which still keeps the vast majority of Germans connected, if people begin to shy away from the former monopoly's ubiquitous analog and ISDN phone systems.
"Internet telephony is not going to bring a large growth in profits," said Rainer Beaujean, head of T-Online, the Deutsche Telekom subsidiary responsible for Internet connections.
"But it is important to keep customers."
Also important to customers is being able to guarantee a certain quality of service, said Carsten Lachmann, who manned a T-Systems -- another Deutsche Telekom subsidiary -- booth at CeBIT.
A typical
VoIP call requires an upstream data supply of about 100 kbps, while today's DSL connections offer between 128 kbps and 392 kbps.
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Friday, March 25, 2005
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