Talk to Me.

INTERNET telephony; MARTINE, Cathy; TELEPHONE systems; DIGITAL telephone systems; MARKET value; BROADBAND communication systems; DATA transmission systems; AT&T Communications Inc.

The article discusses Cathy Martine and her work at AT&T with Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP). AT&T has lost almost a third of its market value, gotten booted out of the Dow Jones industrial average after a 65-year run and retreated from the business of providing consumers with plain old telephone service. Luckily, 18 months ago a 24-year AT&T veteran named Cathy Martine began pushing the company into something new: VoIP, zipping phone calls over the Internet. VoIP turns your analog voice into digital bits, using an existing DSL or cable modem to zip it across the Internet (or, in AT&T's case, its private data network). Once digital, telephone service changes radically. You can adopt any area code you want, no matter where you are based. Callers can ring your home, mobile and office phones all at once, and unwanted callers can be selectively turned away. Small outfits such as Vonage (with 215,000 customers) and Net2Phone (100,000) took early plunges into VoIP, but AT&T could yet outrun them. Martine's service, CallVantage, is slated to be available in 39 states and Washington, D.C. by late August.