NTT moving into VoIP with a vengeance

Just to underscore the announcement of NTT's ambitious videophone we wrote about recently, the Nikkei chimes in with an article on NTT's full-scale entry into the VoIP market this summer. The article states it's to counter the encroachment on NTT's subscriber base by rivals KDDI and Softbank's cheap VoIP services, though that sounds a little off the mark. Given that NTT is tying this up initially with the fiber optic service it's building in to metropolitan apartment blocks, it sounds more like they're trying to increase the attractiveness of fiber to the home and leapfrog DSL, which is where they've taken the biggest hit. Their tardiness in getting into DSL meant that dialup Internet subscribers were deserting to rival providers who were quicker off the mark. So this looks to be more a part of their strategy to counter DSL rivals eating into their Internet subscriber base than it is about phones per se, though it's obviously interesting that NTT is finally embracing a technology that ultimately stands to kill what is still its core business, conventional phones.

[Via the Nikkei Shimbun (Japanese)]