Globalstar Telecommunications placed the first public phone call over its satellite network Thursday in front of an audience at a satellite communications conference in Paris.
The four-minute phone call, made by Globalstar executives standing near Napoleon's tomb on the Champs de Mars in Paris, indicates the company's confidence in its low-Earth-orbit satellite communications system, a company spokesman said. The public demonstration was conducted when only eight of Globalstar's planned 32 satellites are currently in orbit.
Globalstar (GSTRF) is an international consortium of telecom and technology companies, including Loral Space & Communications (LOR), France Telecom, Alcatel, and wireless phone companies Qualcomm (QCOM) and AirTouch Communications (ATI). Globalstar plans to offer phone services, voicemail, messaging, and paging services to global travelers, developing nations, and areas of low-population density where current wireless networks cannot reach.
But the company nearly faced its own Waterloo last week, when a rocket carrying 12 Globalstar satellites crashed after liftoff. The loss of the satellites forced the company to push back the start of its communications services three months, until the third quarter of 1999. As a result, Globalstar has cut its revenue estimates for 1999 by 75 percent to US$100 million.
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Lucent calling: Telecommunications gearmaker Lucent Technologies said Thursday it has developed software that lets Internet telephony systems from different carriers communicate with each other and with the traditional phone networks.
The new lingua franca for Net calls would help carriers offer "seamless" telephone service over the Internet, Lucent said. It also could help IP, or Internet protocol, carriers -- phone companies that use the infrastructure and software technology of the Internet to carry voice conversations -- compete more effectively with traditional switch-based phone companies.
The PacketStar IP Service Platform solves some of the major problems facing Internet telephony providers, Lucent said in a white paper accompanying Thursday's announcement. More importantly, the software allows an IP carrier to connect to any other carrier, no matter what the mix of networking technology, switches, and transmission protocols the carriers use. That means seamless calling between IP-based networks and the public switched-telephone network.
PacketStar also lets IP-telephony providers offer call waiting, call forwarding, and other advanced features, Lucent said. Traditional telephone features like call waiting are tough technical problems for the nascent Internet calling industry.
Potential customers for the software include traditional carriers looking to expand into Internet telephony, startup carriers building IP-based networks, and Internet service providers that want to offer calling services, Lucent said.
Lucent (LU) expects to begin testing the product this month, with a commercial rollout scheduled for the first quarter of 1999. Bell Labs, which developed the PacketStar IP Service Platform, has two patents pending on technologies at the heart of the software.
Lucent is the second major technology company this week to publicly back Internet telephony. On Tuesday, IBM (IBM) announced its own suite of hardware and software products to help carriers quickly implement their own IP telephony initiatives.
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NCI bags Belgian set-top deal: Network Computing said Thursday it will supply the software for CyberTV, an interactive television project planned by Belgacom, Belgium's national telecommunications carrier.
NCI's Custom Connect server software will provide registration and day-to-day management for Belgacom's network of set-top boxes. Belgacom plans to offer home banking, Web browsing, and other Net applications through television. CyberTV will be available to 300 selected customers in September, with Belgacom opening the service to its five million fixed-line customers in January 1999.
NCI is mostly owned by database software publisher Oracle. It competes with Microsoft's WebTV unit in supplying software technology to run television-based Internet access devices.
Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
