A transformation of the world's telephone networks is now reaching home users, with major phone companies in Europe offering to scrap conventional phone lines completely and replace them with Internet connections that handle talk as an added plus.
For the phone companies, the change offers cost savings. The buzzword in this new line of business, already familiar to big corporate phone customers, is Internet protocol, or IP, a way of exchanging data between computers.
The telephone switchboxes now entering homes are simply tiny computers specialized in sending and receiving voice data. They will be among the hot products at the Cebit communications and computer trade fair in Hanover, Germany, later this week.
Most European phone companies are not forcing customers to change to this "next-generation network," but it is conceivable that the existing system -- jokingly known by the acronym POTS, for plain old telephone service -- will one day become history like the telegraph.
Legacy network
Dutch telecoms group KPN has announced it will convert completely to an Internet-type network by the year 2010 and then switch off its "legacy network." At that point, it will, strictly speaking, no longer be a telephone company.
In Germany, Europe's biggest market, Deutsche Telekom introduced its all-IP?service, T-Home, late last year: Customers pay a flat rate to use the Internet and watch cable television as often as they like.
Customers can connect up to two traditional analog telephones to electronic boxes that Telekom supplies free, so they can also make phone calls on the same triple-play wire used for the phone and online connection.
They no longer use POTS at all, but naturally the voice-over-IP network can be used to talk to POTS subscribers or cellphone users. The customer is not supposed to notice any difference at all.
It may be an omen of the future that Telekom is about to reorganize all of its consumer services into a new division to be named "T-Home," where the T-Home next-generation network will be just one of a wide variety of overlapping phone-service plans.
Arcor, a subsidiary of cellphone multinational Vodafone, is to offer German customers a similar service from this month. Germany's second-biggest fixed-line phone company said it had stolen a march on Telekom with an electronic box that automates the conversion.
Arcor executive Zoltan Bickel demonstrated the white box, manufactured in Asia to Arcor specifications: It contains wireless connections to find and connect computers and phones in the vicinity.
He promised there would be no deterioration in voice quality.
More expensive
While the Telekom IP?service is somewhat more expensive than POTS, Arcor says its pricing for combined phone and internet access will be identical in both of its networks. There would be no compulsion, it added: Users could retain traditional lines if they preferred.
Arcor and Telekom are competing to offer television viewers a compelling reason to buy their TV reception via IP instead of simply grabbing the German free-TV signals from the airwaves at nil cost.
Arcor said it would offer a "just missed" service, where customers could "time-shift" a TV show and watch it several minutes after the rest of the country did.
Telekom says it aims to offer a "library" of the day's choicest programming for viewing at the end of the day, but admits on its Web site that this service is "extremely limited."
Television broadcasters are reluctant to allow the phone companies to rebroadcast their shows.
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