Event
Summary
AUSTIN, TX -(BUSINESS WIRE)-April 26th, 2000 via NewsEdge Corporation,
General Bandwidth, Inc., a telecommunications manufacturer, is ready to
deliver the first Voice-over-Broadband gateway designed for the customer
premise market. General Bandwidth announced a strategic business alliance
with Efficient Networks, Inc. (NASDAQ:EFNT) to begin testing compatibility
between Efficient's SpeedStream DSL product line and General Bandwidth's
G6 broadband voice gateway.
Market
Impact
The core of the business alliance formed between General Bandwidth, Inc.
and Efficient Networks is their agreement to develop and endorse standardization
of Voice-Over-Broadband. This standardization will bring together all
forms of broadband communications onto a common voice platform. The development
of standards and interoperability testing between these companies will
reduce the risk of having a proprietary based product offering for broadband
voice technology.
Once
standards are approved, this marketplace will be able to have an open
architecture and compete with the traditional telecommunications vendors.
Ratification of these standards will not happen until 2001, but vendors
will start adopting these standards in the fourth quarter of 2000 (60%
probability).
This
alliance will benefit the SOHO (Small/Home Office) business market because
SOHO's will now be able to have a variety of services available over a
single DSL circuit. This will allow SOHO's to reduce their monthly operating
cost and allow them to be competitive with the larger companies in any
market space.
The
addition of standards to this developing technology will place Broadband
well ahead of the ISDN marketplace, which is both more expensive and completely
absent of a true standard.
User
Recommendations
When interoperability testing is completed later this year, this alliance
will open an entirely new avenue for the SOHO (Small/Home Office) market.
Both users and vendors will be able to leverage the DSL Market as a total
telecommunication solution for the SOHO marketplace. SOHO users that fit
into this area will now be able to have a completely integrated suite
of telecommunication tools with one DSL circuit that used to require several
phone circuits.