And that campus can be distributed, with some people in New York and some in London or Tokyo,'' he adds. As for what carriers and ISPs are doing with the technology, it's a mixed bag. But the most ambitious deployments are coming from smaller or lesser known players. It will resell the service to other carriers, which will offer lower cost voice and fax calling to business and residential end users. The initial network will consist of eight gateways, one in each of eight countries, including Germany, Israel, Japan, Korea, New Zealand and the U.K., with another dozen gateways soon to follow.
Business appears to be booming.
While minuscule compared with the current total global calling volume, which is about half a trillion minutes of usage annually, GXC's activities show use of IP telephony is growing fast. Rimnet Corp. in Tokyo is another Vienna Systems customer. Calls made through Rimnet's network cost 60 yen for three minutes, close to half the cost of the maximum for a long-distance call in these areas. Domestically, big-name ISPs and carriers haven't been as quick to embrace Internet telephony, although they are certainly not dismissing it. PSINet has its fax offering but isn't promising to add voice any time soon.