Recently TMC’s CEO, Rich Tehrani, had the opportunity to sit down and talk with Phone com’s Alon Cohen, EVP and CTO. Cohen is one of the co-founders of VocalTec, which in 1995 announced technology that “really enabled the VoIP market to take off,” according to Tehrani. Marveling at how rapidly the telecom technology is maturing today, Cohen noted that the industry existed “for a hundred years before” Internet Phone, and that by today, even in the 15 years since Internet Phone, the industry has advanced way beyond the PSTN.

The VoIP industry is “still challenging,” Cohen said, “but the challenges are different. When we started, it was all about bandwidth and computing power and getting the audio onto the network. Later on it moved from those challenges to going through firewalls and so on. And today, when we can actually say we’re in the mainstream, the challenges are basically on the marketing side.

Cohen said as far as marketing goes, the challenges are simply getting people to be more aware of the technologies, the benefits and the cost savings.

He described Phone.com as a hosted PBX provider, “some would call it cloud telephony, and we basically provide all your phone services over your data network. You no longer have to invest in metal boxes that perform a kind of magic function, you just let us do the magic.”

The way it works, Cohen said, is you just connect your phone to the network “and we take it from there.”

And given the features Phone.com can offer now, if you saw them 15 years ago, Cohen said, “they would look like science fiction. He described the features as smart routing – “If you had to think in the past how do you transfer a call from one place to another, everything today is just point and click on the Web. You don’t need to be an expert.”

By David Sims.