E-Business
Issue No. 20 - December/January 2005
Chariot claims to steal a march on Internet phone calls
South Australia’s listed Internet services provider, Chariot Limited, has stolen a march on Australia’s largest telcos – including Telstra - with plans to launch from January next year one of the world’s newest systems for low cost calls over the Internet for the mass market.
Importantly, customers will not have to change their existing telephone handsets, PABX systems or their telephone number and can call from anywhere in the world.
Under Chariot, many calls between Internet customers will be free, and where fixed line systems are used to help route calls, costs will be heavily reduced, in some cases by half.
Such use of the Internet for telephone calls has until now, generally been restricted to specialised bolt-on systems to computers, or closed Internet-to-Internet products.
Australia is the first market for the new system, which links Chariot with UK and US-based Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) enterprise, Transcom International.
A new VoIP ‘soft switch’ routes high quality broadband-based telephone calls around the world over the Internet to other VoIP customers (On-net calling) or to any point on the traditional Public Switch Telephony Network (PSTN) as required (Off-net calling).
The technology overcomes most of the historic problems with VoIP such as routing limitations, lack of friendly interface with fixed line networks, reliance on the status of the Internet and high cost for larger businesses moving from fixed-line-only systems to net-based telephone systems.
Rentals will be around $20 per month fixed rates per port.
"The system will inspire a paradigm shift in telephony habits," says Chariot’s managing director, Robert Horlin-Smith.
"This habit change was reflected last month by Telstra, which acknowledged that fixed line telephone numbers in Australia had already dropped by 110,000 in the past year.
"Clearly, callers have commenced a permanent telephon...
