NOTEBAERT ANNOUNCES QWEST WILL OFFER VoIP TO CONSUMERS
Qwest CEO Richard Notebaert told a conference audience Tues. that his company had decided to offer mass market Voice-over-IP (VoIP) service starting in Minn., where a U.S. Dist. Court recently ruled that VoIP provider Vonage could provide its service without telecom regulation. At a Yankee Group Telecom Industry Forum in Washington, Notebaert said Qwest had “come to the conclusion VoIP is not a bad path [to deregulation] so Qwest is going to become one of them.” He said Qwest already offered the service to big business or “enterprise” customers.
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Vonage, “while advertising itself as ’the broadband phone company,’ insists it is not a phone company, it is simply an Internet service provider that is not subject to any regulation,” Notebaert said. He said Qwest wasn’t interested in VoIP to “circumvent access charges or universal service fees or avoid putting in 911,” but “we are taking this journey as a path to deregulation… Consistent with the action of the federal courts and the inaction on the part of the FCC, VoIP might be just the opportunity to break the regulatory log jam.” Asked how Qwest would provide the service, Notebaert said it could be done on DSL or even dial- up theoretically: “There are different ways to do that.” The bottom line, he said: “The courts have said no regulation. We all know we are going to VoIP. We are doing what some customers said we want you to do. Rather than be a victim, why not be an aggressor.”
A Qwest spokesman said the company hadn’t announced timing for the rollout of VoIP or how the service would be deployed. It’s being offered “in response to demands from consumers,” he said.
Notebaert had emphasized in his speech that Qwest had become more customer-oriented, for example writing contracts with business customers that were easy to read and only a few pages long. The company offers quarterly service reviews and Internet self-serving when customers desire, he said. “We don’t force self-service, but if the customer wants it, we accommodate,” Notebaert said.
Sprint CEO Gary Forsee said in a later Yankee Group speech Sprint had nearly completed reorganizing its sales staffs around customers rather than products. He said that meant product-based sales groups were pulled apart and re- formed to reflect types of customers. As a result, a business customer no longer would be courted or served by 2 or 3 separate sales organizations, and instead one unified group would call to discuss all of the client’s needs, he said. “It didn’t take me long to learn that if we're coming out to you with individual [products and teams] and we're not talking to you about your solutions or business requirements, then obviously we've got work to do,” he told corporate information officers in the audience.
The change is a reflection of the company’s “one Sprint” campaign to emphasize that Sprint offers customers unified service, wireline and wireless combined, Forsee said. “No one is better positioned than Sprint” to make that offer because it has its own national wireline and wireless networks, he said. The company already has realigned its back-office systems and now is working on “front-facing functions,” Forsee said. “This is more than moving boxes, it’s changing the orientation from products to customers,” he told reporters afterward.