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.