High speed communications backbone builder Qwest Communications International Inc has found another way to make money out of its partially completed US-wide network; by offering long distance telephony over IP at the bargain basement rate of a 7.5 cents per minute via its Q.Talk service. Qwest has already made money out of the network before its completion by selling raw fibers to other carriers and by selling wholesale capacity to internet service providers and telecoms companies. The service that can be accessed by dialing into Denver, Colorado-based Qwest’s network like an ordinary long distance service and, unusually for IP telephony, will use phones at each end. It is currently only available from the nine cities that Qwest has already got its fast network connected to; Anaheim, Los Angeles, Oakland, Sacramento, San Jose, San Francisco, Salt Lake City, Denver and Kansas City. Internet telephony has the reputation for being of lamentable quality, but Qwest claims its service has two key advantages over first generation internet telephony offerings. Firstly, it claims the same level of call quality as standard long distance because the calls are transmitted on its uncongested network and run at full uncompressed digital voice rate of 64Kbps. It says current quality of internet telephony is also hampered by delays of the internet through multiple hops from router to router, and gaps in conversation caused by packet loss and says it will counter this by only offering IP telephony over its own network, and interconnecting to other long distance carriers to transfer the calls the rest of the way. Currently Qwest will only sign long distance customers in the cities it covers, but calls can be made to anywhere in the contiguous 48 US states. Qwest refuses to discuss how it has achieved 7.5 cents pricing, as it has pay other long distance carriers for the majority of calls made. The possibility is that Qwest is quickly trying to build its customer base, using the service as a loss leader, before extending the network to 25 cities by mid-year, and to the full 125 locations by mid-1999.
