Covad Readies Turnkey VoIP

With the purchase of VoIP specialist GoBeam, Covad is astonishingly close to delivering a complete voice service to IT departments, end users, and ISPs across the nation.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Managing Editor [March 12, 2004]

Steve Lail, vice president for voice deployment at San Jose, Calif.-based Covad Communications, knows what it takes to deliver a VoIP service that replaces the telephone. He's been working on it for at least two years.

"Covad did a trial in late 2002 that cause us to spend about a year determining all our different options," he says. "It's not something we've been working on for 60 or 90 days."

There were three alternatives: using an underlying service provider (say, Vonage), building its own VoIP service, or buying one.

First, Covad tried building its own. Covad's voice service was offered to small businesses in the San Francisco bay area, but did not, presumably, succeed. What did it lack?

Lail points out that Covad's national infrastructure already contained most of the pieces the company needed. "You need about four different components to have a VoIP solution that can replace voice service," he notes. The four items he lists are:

1. Last mile broadband (Covad has this)
2. Provisioning, billing, and other infrastructure (Covad has this)
3. A VoIP platform including softswitches and application servers (Covad lacked this)
4. A transport mechnism

"If our case," explains Lail, "the transport mechanism is our own ATM network. The ATM network transports voice IP packets to the opposite edge of the network and hands off the traffic to the PSTN or wherever it has to go."

Covad obtained the missing parts when it acquired Pleasanton, Calif.-based GoBeam. Lail says the company already has 13,000 subscribers to its VoIP service, and sample business customers can be seen on its Customer Testimonials Web page.

The product will be available from Covad directly, as its precursor was. But it will also be available through Covad's channel partners, such as EarthLink.

In either case, the idea is that customers should be able to buy their voice services from their broadband service provider. "It's turnkey," says Lail. "You go to one location and get the full breadth of the technology you need. Some providers don't have last mile broadband so you have to get that from somewhere else, and some broadband providers don't have the voice part of the equation."

And some broadband providers have an expensive legacy voice network that they don't want to compete with, in a classic case of channel conflict.

For Covad, VoIP is an obvious road to growth. "It's just a natural extension of the business," says Lail. "We've been providing quality broadband for years. With GoBeam's capabilities, we truly end up with a turnkey solution."

— End