AT&T chief determined to ride VoIP wave
Published: 02 Sep 2004 15:50 BST
Earlier this month, AT&T announced joint-marketing agreements with a number of cable companies for your CallVantage VoIP offering. Can you elaborate?
What we were finding was 40 percent of the people who called us about CallVantage said they saw our commercial and thought it was cool. They said they wanted to get it, but then we found they didn't have broadband.
They'd say, "What is that?" And we'd say, "It's a high-speed cable modem or DSL, are you interested?" And they'd say, "Yes".
I needed a way to fulfil that. The cable guys like to sell broadband, so it seemed like a pretty logical thing to (enter a joint-marketing agreement). We also asked the Bells. We said, "we get these calls, would you like us to sell them DSL?" The Bells said, "we don't want to talk to you, we're not interested, leave us alone," while the cable guys said, "heck yeah, we'd love to sell more cable modems".
With this joint-marketing agreement and the money you're putting into marketing your CallVantage service, do you feel like you're carrying the cable guys' water?
There is no question they are getting some benefit, but you need to think about how big this market will be. My sense is this will be a really big market and you only get one chance to seise leadership. I think AT&T made a terrible mistake with WorldNet, watching AOL, MSN, EarthLink and Mindspring run away with the dial-up access business when it had a national network and could have offered it for $15. It sat there and said, "We really don't understand why people would ever do this." I was at Pacific Bell back in those days, knocking myself out trying to get into the dial-up business because I was convinced it would be a huge thing. AT&T just ignored it.
I'm not going to let that happen with VoIP. VoIP is a transformational application. Having run a Bell company, been through the building of Sprint, working at PointCast and getting a sense of all this, I sit here looking at people paying a Bell company $112 for two lines, not including long distance, and I can sell them VoIP for (a promotional monthly fee of) $19.95, plus the cost of broadband with better features and more capabilities. I'm not going to miss that.
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