To provide the bandwidth for such new services, as well as Internet telephone service, which it will roll out midyear, PSINet recently completed the purchase of a high-capacity backbone. The 900-employee company has also increased its staff by a third during the last year. It expects to keep hiring at that rate. As IP telephony moves into the mainstream, ISPs will have to become more like a phone company, with all the tech-support and customer service obligations that implies. Expecting phone utility service AGIS, for example, is planning to quadruple its staff this year in its drive toward telephony.
People expect the phone service to be a utility.
When it's not on, there's a real problem. The company plans to roll out IP telephony in late 1998. Broadcasting concerts, speeches Even UUNet, the largest backbone provider, sees big money in telephony, fax, audio and video. UUNet, by contrast, however, will merely carry the traffic, leaving it to their customers to arrange the rest. UUNet has also become a proponent of IP Multicast, a technology designed for broadcasting audio or video to thousands of people.