Lucent Technologies Inc, determined to make voice and video communication over the internet as easy-to-use and accessible as the telephone, has unveiled a new business venture and products to bring internet communication into the mainstream. Lucent will offer a set of products that enables high-quality speech, music and video communications over the internet to become more widely available. It would enable customers with access to corporate intranets or the internet to bypass public phone networks. Callers would be able to call overseas at local telephone rates. The newly formed marketing venture will be called Elemedia, short for elements of multimedia and will commercialize several internet software compression technologies developed at Lucent’s Bell Laboratories research unit. Lucent also envisages using the telephone or other consumer electronics devices, rather than a personal computer, for internet access. It said its software enables telephone-quality conversations over the internet. The new products will be available in the US in early 1997 and rolled out to major overseas markets in the second quarter of 1997.
