Beyond Internet Call Waiting

Many ISPs have had a measure of success offering ICW to their dial-up users. Here's a new, free call notification system based on IP voice technology that does the job more reliably.

by Gerry Blackwell

When Internet call waiting (ICW) products and services first began to appear a couple of years ago, Marc Beaulieu thought they sounded like a pretty good idea.

Here was a novel way to differentiate his service—Beaulieu is director general of GlobeTrotter, an ISP with about 70,000 subscribers in Quebec, Canada—and maybe even earn a little extra revenue too.

But while he was investigating ICW opportunities, Beaulieu stumbled on Luc St. Arnaud, a guy with a slightly different take on how to solve the problem of residential customers who have a single phone line and don't want to miss phone calls.

St. Arnaud, now president and CEO of eRing Solutions Inc. of Montreal, went on, with Beaulieu's help, to develop the itRings "voice chat" system, which after 18 months is finally beginning to catch on.

Getting some respect
itRings was recently recognized by Yahoo! Life magazine as one of the top 50 best free things on the Web and the best in the telephony category. eRing already has 46 Web portal and ISP customers for its itRings co-branded ASP offering—including 15 new ones in one recent three-week period.

Could itRings be a better option than ICW for ISPs? Beaulieu certainly thinks so.

"We thought this alternative was so much better than call waiting," he says. "With itRings, the Internet user could actually talk to the other person, and without leaving the Internet link."

The service has been a modest hit with GlobeTrotter's customers too. About 8,000 to 10,000 now use itRings.

Competition's shortcomings
ICW in fact has a couple of downsides. Users must first subscribe to the phone company's call forwarding service, which doesn't always work perfectly in ICW applications. It's also an extra expense for the subscriber.

And ICW services, for the most part, only tell a subscriber that someone is calling their number. If they want to talk to the person, with most services, they have to drop the Internet connection and take the call using a regular phone.

St. Arnaud's idea, not 100-percent original, was to use voice over Internet (VoIP) to let subscribers actually talk to callers using the sound card, microphone, and speakers in their PC.

Some ICW vendors do offer an often unimplemented VoIP option, but St. Arnaud's concept was a little different.

VoIP over the open Internet has always been problematic because of latency and jitter problems—the reason most ICW vendors don't push it hard or haven't implemented it yet.

Message exchange
St. Arnaud's novel solution was to have the caller and the subscriber exchange voice messages instead of trying to have a realtime VoIP conversation—Internet chat, only with voice.

The caller (on a regular phone) calls an itRings access number—there is a toll-free number for all of North America, plus local numbers in some cities—then keys in the subscriber's regular telephone number.

This is decidedly not the strongest part of the service concept. The caller has to know the subscriber has the itRings service and have the access number—although if the subscriber also had phone company voice mail, he could give the itRings number in his greeting.

Will callers in the know want to always call the itRings number? Probably not. So they'll likely make one call, get a busy signal, then call the itRings number. A bit clunky. But still. . . .

If the subscriber is on the Internet, an incoming call box pops up on his screen and generates a ringing sound. If he opts to take the call, the caller is invited to record an introductory message.

ItRings plays the message over the subscriber's PC speakers. Then he can record his response, which the eRing gateway plays to the caller—and the exchange continues from there.

go to page 2: Appropriate technology?