Article Excerpt:
TWST: We'd like to begin with a brief historical sketch of Transglobe Internet and a picture of the things you are doing at the present time.Mr. Oh: We began as a private company in Vancouver, Canada, in 1999 through a series of strategic mergers with other private companies. We became a public company in 2002 on the Toronto Ventures Exchange, and we are currently operating as a public entity. Originally, our primary goal was to build a telecom services company around a new technology called voice over Internet Protocol. Back in 1999, the VoIP business was unformed and undefined and was pretty much an open market in terms of what services could be provided, but, at the same time, the adoption rate of VoIP by consumers and major carriers wasn't a very large factor. In fact, nobody actually knew what VoIP was until the last two or three years. So we were able to take our first-mover advantage and build a client base across Canada. Right now, we have offices in Vancouver, Calgary and in Toronto. We have over 12,000 customers across Canada who subscribe to our voice over Internet Protocol services. So we expect to continue expansion to other parts of Canada, and being one of the first early adopters of the VoIP technology strategy has actually been a very good advantage for us.
TWST: What difficulties have there been along the way? Are there any
things in the way of VoIP that have to be worked out?
Mr. Oh: When we first started business in the late 1990s and early 2000,
the VoIP technology wasn't at a commercialized level that was
acceptable. In fact, if you were to compare VoIP quality versus regular
PSTN analog quality ' the quality you get on the regular phone ' the
difference would have been large, probably somewhere around 20% or 30%
different in favor of your standard analog telephone. In the last two
years, that difference has probably shrunk to 5% or 6%. So you are now
seeing a time where the commercialization aspects of VoIP are very
favorable to the consumer.
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