Cable & Wireless turns to VOIP

The 'Cable & Wireless IP Voice' service claims to deliver 25% savings to UK businesses, which has been independently validated by telecoms pricing consultancy Tariffcom. C&W says the savings are derived from a combination of a reduction in external call charges, and a saving on network infrastructure and management costs.

Other UK VoIP offerings are currently aimed at either residential broadband customers or small businesses. Cable & Wireless IP Voice is aimed at mid-sized and large enterprises.

It expects the main appeal for the product will lie with companies that already outsource the management of their voice networks to telecoms companies, and are looking to connect two or more office sites.

Royston Hoggarth, chief executive of Cable & Wireless UK, said, "Voice will be the killer application to drive UK businesses towards widespread adoption of IP. For businesses already using IP-VPN QoS, the next step in their journey to an integrated communications and computing infrastructure is to migrate their voice networks to IP."

The move follows last month's announcement by US telecoms company AT&T, that it will test a new Voice over Internet Protocol (VOIP) offering in the UK this autumn, in advance of a 2005 launch.

VoIP can be used as a way to cut phone costs by sending calls over the Internet rather than over landline systems. Analysts at Juniper Research predict that the market for VoIP will represent 12% of total global telephony revenues by 2009.







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