In its never-ending quest for local telephone access to the home, AT&T has recently announced a cable deal with Time Warner. This is the second cable deal for AT&T -- remarkably, their pending deal with TCI has yet to close and they are already working on their next cable acquisition. Based on these and other developments, I think 1999 will surely be the year of broadband access to the home. I won't suggest that the majority of households will have high-speed Internet access in their homes this year; however, I do think 1999 will be the year we look back on five years from now as the watershed year for high-speed home access.

High-speed net access to the home will be the biggest thing to happen to the Internet telephony industry since the Internet telephony gateway. To date, Internet telephony products are purchased by service providers and corporations, but imagine the new opportunities to sell into the consumer Internet telephony market.

Consider that companies like Selsius Systems have IP-based telephones that have so far been limited to the corporate market. Eventually, IP-based telephones will be able to connect to the high-speed network of your home. Likewise, Intel's USB port -- the high-speed access port connected to most new PCs -- can be connected to USB telephones from companies like Nortel to allow real phone-based Internet telephony communication.

With always on broadband access, placing a call from one IP-based telephone to another can even bypass the traditional PSTN (Public Switched Telephone Network) and communicate in native IP. But to place a call from one IP-based telephone to another, what number do you dial? Do you enter an IP address? Will we replace our phone numbers with IP addresses? We will eventually have to map IP addresses to telephone numbers and back. If so, who will be responsible for this mapping?

Logically, the cable modem service provider can assign a telephone number to you that is mapped to a specific IP address. This does get a bit tricky...I would expect service providers to charge you for the privilege of mapping your telephone number to an IP address. Anyone can do the same thing if they are so inclined -- we may even be able to choose between directory service providers in the future. It will be interesting to see how this pans out. The corollary in traditional telephony is the 800 number directory. AT&T maintains a nationwide directory, and users with telephone service from other companies pay a monthly surcharge to be listed in AT&T's directory (if they remember to list themselves). This model may very well work for IP address and telephone number mapping.

IP Centrex is another wonderful service that I have often written about in CTI magazine, but has yet to happen. (I suppose we can consider Internet call waiting as the birth of IP Centrex.) Broadband access to the home makes IP Centrex a natural. If you have a PC, you can likely have Centrex (even the most advanced PBX) features through the use of software for your IP calls. If you decide to mix and match between circuit-switched and IP telephony calls, you will need the use of remote Internet telephony gateways -- which means you will need Centrex service.

In the next year, we can expect Internet telephony products and services to proliferate more rapidly than ever. The reason for this is simple -- as broadband access proliferates, so does the number of companies looking to penetrate the vast untapped Internet telephony market. Just as developers produce software for the OS that has the largest installed base, we can expect development in IP telephony to increase rapidly as the potential market for the technology reaches critical mass.

Rich Tehrani welcomes comments at rtehrani@tmcnet.com.