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IT’S YOUR CALL |
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The Many Flavours of Voice |
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July
2004 - IGB Grant +1 514 849 3508
& Brian Sharwood +1
416 413 9381
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KEY HIGHLIGHTS: |
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- A long time coming: A new generation of phone
services has arrived. Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) telephony works – and
customers now have choice – It works well enough to be considered
a substitute for the traditional circuit-switched telephone.
- Consumers will balance needs for reliability,
quality, security, functionality and mobility, weighing the strengths
and weaknesses of the many options of phone service and choose what is
right for them.
- New offerings, from new service providers:
such as Primus® (TalkBroadband™),
babyTEL®, Vonage® Canada, Net2Phone®, WebCall by Navigata and
Skype™, are
providing consumers with alternative connection modalities; and, importantly,
they are
offering new ways of managing the voice communications dynamic.
> The proverbial ‘bar’ has been raised. The new services are clearly
superior, from a functional perspective, to the old.
- Feature sets are expanding. Consumers now
have more choice in how and where and when they make and receive calls.
- VoIP services will grow as customers become
comfortable with the technology. SeaBoard forecasts suggest that over
250,000 subscribers will try a VoIP service by the end of 2005. By
2009, as many as a quarter of all telephone subscribers may have substituted
a local wireline phone for a VoIP offering.

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