Re: MUL - Where to from here?
I will definitely note AGAINST for my shares.
here is news about voip from yahoo.
http://biz.yahoo.com/fo/e-gang04_article1.html
And i still remember that i read an artical a few months ago saying that voip would be the next boom after 2000 tech boom.
Talk to Me
By Elizabeth Corcoran
The former Ma Bell has had a bruising year. AT&T has lost almost a third of its market value, gotten booted out of the Dow Jones industrial average after a 65-year run and retreated from the business of providing consumers with plain old telephone service. Luckily, 18 months ago a 24-year AT&T veteran named Cathy Martine began pushing the company into something new: VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol), zipping phone calls over the Internet.
In March 2003 Martine was set to propose a VoIP test to AT&T brass, but she got bumped at the last minute. So Martine sidestepped AT&T protocol and zapped her plan directly to AT&T Chairman David Dorman by e-mail. He okayed it in hours. Now Net phone service is a big priority at AT&T.
VoIP turns your analog voice into digital bits, using an existing DSL or cable modem to zip it across the Internet (or, in AT&T's case, its private data network). Once digital, telephone service changes radically. You can adopt any area code you want, no matter where you are based. Callers can ring your home, mobile and office phones all at once, and unwanted callers can be selectively turned away. You can even download voice mail messages from a laptop in Singapore.
Small outfits such as Vonage (with 215,000 customers) and Net2Phone (100,000) took early plunges into VoIP, but AT&T could yet outrun them. Martine's service, CallVantage, is slated to be available in 39 states and Washington, D.C. by late August. She wants a million consumers and businesses using CallVantage by the end of 2005 but won't say how many callers have signed up so far.
AT&T researchers had been noodling around with VoIP for a decade, but as recently as 2002 the business side was dubious: Too few households had broadband Internet connections (and only 20% do today). Call quality was unreliable, and the service dies in a power blackout. "The feeling was, ‘No one will want to buy this from us,'" Martine says. "I looked at it the opposite way and asked, ‘Why not?'"
In five years AT&T had poured an estimated $3 billion into a digital overhaul of its backbone network. Martine argued that by spending a few tens of millions more on marketing and software, AT&T could have a compelling and high-quality service for consumers. Businesses would follow.
Once Martine got Dorman's assent, just four months later her group was rolling out service to the homes of 900 AT&T employees in three states. They loved the service but hated the original name: Consumer Digital Solutions. "They told us not to AT&T-ize it," Martine says. She listened, switched to CallVantage and aims to give customers more Net: games, movies, music, as long as it is digital. Says Martine: "It's the art of the possible."
i don't mind the short-term share price as long as mul can move ahead and lead the tech. will the CEOs be good enough to take that challenge?