Q&A: AT&T chief David Dorman, on call of the Net
Using Internet technologies to make phone calls got a huge endorsement last week when industry icon AT&T Corp. rolled out its ‘‘voice over Internet protocol’’ service, called CallVantage in Greater Boston, offering unlimited local and long distance calls for $35 a month over a broadband Internet connection. AT&T chief executive David W. Dorman spoke with Globe telecommunications reporter Peter J. Howe.
Q. Was there a ‘‘Come here, Watson!’’ moment when you decided that voice over IP was finally a good enough technology to carry the AT&T brand?
A. The epiphany for me came when Hossein Eslamblochi, our chief technology officer, and I were having dinner last fall. He said the ability to manage a stream of voice packets in a very elegant fashion and provide voice over IP in a very-high-quality way is quickly becoming a reality. My question was, if that’s true, how quickly can we get there, and what are the impediments for a broadbased deployment? After looking at that for the next several days we concluded that, gosh, this is a moment in time that we just can’t miss.
You know, [in the 1990s] we pretty much sat back and watched the dial-up Internet business get built around us by AOL and EarthLink and MSN. We participated in it largely at a wholesale level, not at the retail level, until very late when we got into WorldNet and got a couple of million subscribers of our own. I often wonder if AT&T had gotten out of the blocks sooner with WorldNet, how many dial-up Internet subscribers could we have had? Part of that was a lack of recognition on the part of AT&T management at the time — not to be too critical — about how big this was going to be.
I don’t suffer from any of those things with respect to voice over IP. I think it’s going to be huge. I think it’s going to be pervasive. We are going to be leaders here. If you watch the Olympics this summer, I promise you will become completely sick of ads for AT&T VOIP services.
Q. Any worries relying on Verizon digital subscriber lines or Comcast modems for people to use AT&T CallVantage?
A. I’m just as worried as Jerry Yang [chief executive of Web portal Yahoo] is. Yahoo’s built a market cap of, what, $40 billion or $50 billion? And they don’t own a network.
Q. What new features for CallVantage are coming?
A. I probably shouldn’t say, but we have a host of features planned over the next six quarters. The great thing here is the innovation cycle is on Internet speed, not on Western Electric-Bell Labs-Northern Telecom development cycles, which were two-year marches. With the old telephone switches, caller ID took 10 years to get done. We will see feature development happen in days. I don’t want to sound too melodramatic, but if you go back to the period of time after the Apple 2E personal computer was introduced, there was just a couple of pieces of software. Then, there was just a blossoming of applications that got written. We think the same thing could happen here.
I think the nexus between the current cellular telephone and VOIP delivered over WiFi [high-speed home wireless broadband connections] is pretty interesting. Think about the cordless phone in your house, and imagine a cellphone that has that capability to use VOIP over WiFi and when it gets out of the house it roams onto cellular. That, I think, is going to be a big, big deal.
