BY DARA BLOOM
Editor, TMCnet.com™

The Mainstreaming Of Internet Call Waiting

As a technology writer, I hear about the latest and greatest technologies when they're still vaporware. By the time a product is actually shipping, it often seems like old news. Lately, I've been thinking about what makes a product or technology truly mainstream -- embraced by a decent portion of the general public in the way Web browsers or Palm Pilots have been, for instance. Is it mainstream when the New York Times writes about it? Or maybe when your non-technical relatives starting talking about it?

Ultimately, I think one of the biggest indicators of the "mainstreaming" of a technology is when the cost model shifts from a fee-based, customer-pays model, to a free for the customer, advertising-supported one. At that point, advertisers believe the customer base is large enough to merit their ad dollars. For examples of ad-driven successes, we can look to fax-to-e-mail services, Web-based e-mail, and even the growing number of free Internet access services such as NetZero.

So earlier this week, when I received several e-mails and a phone call from CallWave letting me know about their new, free Internet Answering Machine product, I took notice. If you telecommute occasionally, or just bring work home with you, you might not feel it's worth putting in a second line for an Internet connection, let alone bothering with a cable modem or DSL. Still, you don't want to miss calls when you're online. The Internet Answering Machine makes it possible for you to listen to incoming calls over your PC's speakers (or lets callers leave you a message) concurrent with your Internet activity.

There are a number of solutions out now that allow you to manage both your Internet connection and your PSTN phone calls using just one line. They include stand-alone software solutions such as CallWave's, hardware products that sit between your phone and PC, and solutions in the form of enhanced services from your ISP or phone company.

Internet Call Waiting Begins With Hardware
In the beginning, there were Internet call waiting devices. And they're still around -- these devices typically sit between your phone and PC, and act as a liaison between your Internet connection and phone line. A touch of a button allows you to switch easily between a phone call and Internet connection, but you cannot listen to your calls while you continue to browse the Web. If you compare the cost of these boxes to that of installing a second line in your home, you're coming away with a bargain. Still, they're not cheap: The WEBS Call Waiting Detector will run you $49.95. The prices go up from there, with Net Sense selling for $59.95 and fP Technologies' bulky Call Catcher for $69.95. In their defense, these prices are a one-time cost. There are no service fees involved with these hardware solutions.

You'll need to have call waiting as part of your phone service in order to use these hardware solutions. For more information on these types of devices, including how they work with your phone company's call waiting feature, read TMC Labs technology editor Evan Koblentz's February 1999 INTERNET TELEPHONY article "Internet Call Waiting: A Killer App Whose Time Has Come."

Moving To Low-Cost And No-Cost Software Solutions
You'll get lower prices, more functionality, and a sleeker interface from today's Internet call waiting software solutions. Let's get back to CallWave. I wrote about this company's FaxWave service early this year in a column about free fax, while I was telecommuting from England. Friends and co-workers back home could send faxes to my personal U.S. FaxWave number, and the fax was then e-mailed to me. I love this service, and still use it occasionally now that I'm back in the States.

CallWave's latest offering, the Internet Answering Machine, goes beyond the functionality of the hardware solutions mentioned earlier. You can still switch between phone and Internet, but you can also listen to callers leaving messages for you while you continue to browse the Web. It is indeed the only free service of this type currently available, as far as I know.

Whenever something is offered for free, I'm interested in knowing just how much of a deal I'm getting. If I had to purchase it, how much would it cost? In this case, solutions competing with CallWave are barely more expensive than free. Pagoo, a company worth mentioning for its fun name alone, charges a meager $3.95 per month for its Internet call waiting service (with a minimum one-year contract). That breaks down to about 13 cents a day -- the coffee I buy every morning costs 10 times that amount. So, free in this case is just barely better than paid.

InfoInterActive's Internet Call Manager has a similar pricing scheme, which begins at a maximum of $5 per month depending on the length of your contract. Both Pagoo and Internet Call Manager offer 30-day free trials, so you can try the service before you commit to a service plan.

One thing all of these solutions have in common is that you'll need to arrange (and usually pay extra) for "busy, call forward" service with your phone company. The solutions above work by having the "busy, call forward" feature take an incoming call while you're online and forward those calls to a server (run by CallWave, or whichever service you're using) which accepts the call. You'll then see the active call through the software interface on your desktop, and you manage the call through the GUI. The trick is whether your local telco offers "busy, call forward" service or not. SNET, my local company, doesn't, so these services wouldn't work in my home.

For Service Providers
Service providers shouldn't feel left out -- there's some money to be made here. Rich Tehrani's September 1998 CTI Publisher's Outlook, "Ban Busy Signals! Support Internet Call Waiting"  noted that there are plenty of solutions that let service providers offer Internet call waiting as an enhanced service. In addition to the Nortel, Lucent, and eFusion products Rich mentioned in his column, voice over packet companies such as VocalTec are in on the game, too. Earlier this year, VocalTec announced Internet call waiting as part of its Ensemble Architecture, which enables carrier-class voice over IP services.

And in January of this year, GTE Corp. announced it would begin offering Internet call waiting to its customers, with a full roll-out in March. In their second quarter report this year, the company noted that one of the major contributors to their overall growth included an increase in revenue from consumer vertical services, such as call waiting. Many other service providers are following suit, and are offering this service bundled as part of call waiting/voice mail service, or for additional per-month fees.

For the end user, advertising-driven services let us add functionality to our communications without adding cost. As long as you can deal with exposure to yet another ad for something you invariably don't need, you win. Large service providers such as GTE may find they need to bundle Internet call waiting with other enhanced services in order to sell it. Small service providers, on the other hand, may find they must follow CallWave's model of making a small company competitive with the big guys by altering traditional revenue models. Ultimately, it will be the end users that dictate pricing structure. And if those customers choose CallWave, I believe services such as Pagoo and Internet Call Manager will be forced to emulate an advertising-driven model.

The New York Times has written about it, and the relatives want to know more. Internet call waiting has become mainstream.

Dara Bloom welcomes your comments at dbloom@tmcnet.com.