Lucent Technologies Inc has come up with internet telephony software that it claims runs on regular phone or fax equipment and has already got several major long-distance providers sufficiently worried to be testing the platform, called Lucent Internet Telephony Server SP (Service Provider). MCI Communications Corp and France Telecom SA are both planning trials, and GTE Corp’s Telephone Operations said it will start a laboratory evaluation next month. Lucent said it’s talking to all kinds of service providers; long-distance, internet and local exchange carriers and cable companies, both in the US and internationally. A service provider will need two of the servers; one near both the origination and completion stations of the phone or fax call. The product is due for release in the third quarter. When a call is placed from a standard phone, it is routed to the caller’s local central office incurring any local charges. It’s then handed to a local Internet Telephony Server SP, which sends the call over the internet, or another data network to the other Lucent server, which then routes the call to its destination over the local public-switched network. The package comprises both software and hardware, and supports all types of switches, according to Lucent. It complements the company’s Internet Telephony Server for corporations, which is also out in the third quarter. That package is meant to sit alongside a company’s PBX, while this one is meant for service providers. It follows a similar announcement last week from USA Global Link Inc (CI No 3,127). The product comes out of Lucent’s recently-formed elemedia unit, using the elemedia speech coder software developed at the company’s Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey (CI No 3,004).
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