CHINA APPROVES VOIP

This means that both ITXC and China Telecom can "implement plans to expand aggressively," said Tom Evslin, chairman and chief executive of ITXC, told Total Telecom. The companies have an operating agreement with each other whereby the U.S.-based company uses China Telecom to terminate its calls to China, and the Chinese carrier uses ITXC to offer its customers an international Internet telephony service.

The Chinese service allows customers to use their regular phones to make calls which are then routed via the Internet.

Evslin said Internet telephony has been particularly successful in China because of the lower call costs and also speed of implementation in a country with relatively low teledensity. As part of the trial the pair rolled the service out to 16 cities in one month for both domestic and international traffic.

"China is a major destination and source of traffic for us," he said. Although Evslin would not reveal specific plans for expansion at this time, he said that ITXC is going to ramp up marketing of calls to China and also provide more services to the country.

The companies have been involved in trials for the past nine months, and the ministry of information industry (MII) authorized the four companies to provide IP telephony services on 1 April 2000.

ITXC claims its ITXC.net is the largest Internet telephony network in the world with 245 points of presence in more than 143 cities and 57 countries.

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