December 2004

The VoIP Stars Come Out In Los Angeles

INTERNET TELEPHONY® magazine’s inaugural VoIP Service Provider Awards dinner was held at Bernard’s Restaurant in the Millennium Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles on October 4th. TMC’s president, Rich Tehrani awarded the 52 winning companies selected to receive the industry’s first-ever achievement recognition for developing services and products in the VoIP space.

From the earliest days of VoIP, service providers such as iBasis, Net2Phone, ITXC (now Teleglobe), deltathree.com, and others have held the banner high for the transition from TDM to IP. Year after year, their impact of their success has been evident, as IP traffic as a share of overall telephony traffic has increased exponentially; first as a measure of backhaul and now increasingly as last-mile, broadband telephony minutes of use. Facilitated by partners such as TelX and Arbinet, embodied in the reincarnation of industry giants such as AT&T, and validated by the success of relative newcomers like Qwest and Level 3, these VoIP service providers represent the breadth and depth of the vanguard of tomorrow’s telecommunications industry. IP has changed the game, and these companies all stand as shining beacons of the evolution to this brave new world of IP telephony.

TMC President Rich Tehrani addressed the crowd and said, “Tonight we are honoring the companies that started it all in the VoIP space. Ten, twenty, thirty years from now you will be remembered as the VoIP industry pioneers. You belong to the industry elite, and tonight we want to honor your achievements.”

Michael Khalilian, Chairman of the IPCC, and industry organization, acknowledged the number of VoIP service providers present as the responsible ones to spread out the new technology in a way that it will one day be easily and commonly recognizable just as legacy telephonic communications is. “In time, however, VoIP will be widely known as Multimedia over broadband,” concluded Khalilian.

The INTERNET TELEPHONY® magazine editorial staff congratulates all the winners, and looks forward to next year’s event.

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