SBC Merger Wont Derail AT&Ts Plans

This will give the SBC-AT&T combination an advantage in providing diverse services and dealing with a large number of customers.

He also noted that AT&T also had the proven "operational discipline and capability" to manage millions of subscribers.

Prior experience has shown that smaller telecommunications startups tend to have quality-of-service problems once they start serving more than 1 million subscribers, he said.

Click here to read the details about America Online Inc.s plans to offer VOIP phone services.

With these plans and its infrastructure in place, AT&T is serving notice that it doesnt plan to stand idly on the sidelines as a clutch of new and existing telecommunications companies that are getting into the VOIP market.

For example, AOL officials revealed Tuesday that it was it was starting a VOIP service integrated with its AOL Instant Messenger console and based on PSTN network services and switching provided by partners Level 3 Communications Inc. and Sonus Networks Inc.

Vonage Holdings Corp. announced on Monday that it had become the first VOIP service provider to activate more than 500,000 broadband VOIP lines.

AT&T is also in a position to offer enhanced IP services for enterprises and small businesses that go beyond the residential or consumer voice services that other VOIP services offer.

For example, AT&T is working on enhanced IP video conferencing that would allow automatic audio to text translation, which would allow users to review the conference archive and search back to a specific point of interest.

"This allows us to search that conference clip and find the actual key words that you are interested in rather than watching an entire two-hour clip to listen to what you are really interested," he said.

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