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Voice calls on Internet open a Pandora's Box for HK Telecom

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KUDOS to the Office of the Telecommunications Authority (OFTA) for practising what it preaches. It is going through the trial stages of building a presence on Internet's World-Wide Web.

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For an organisation that must disseminate information in enormous volumes, OFTA's Web pages are well planned.

Building a Web presence is the easy part of OFTA's general Web agenda. An advertisement in this newspaper last week offering voice telephone calls via the Internet highlighted a far more complex issue with which the authority must deal.

The technology exists for using the Internet as a vehicle for voice, though it is somewhat cumbersome at this stage. But the cost savings potential in using the Internet for voice are likely to induce people to put up with its initially cumbersome nature.The service advertised last week was offering voice services to virtually anywhere in the world for a flat rate of $10 per hour.

Hongkong Telecom International, which has a monopoly on international voice telephony that extends until 2006, must be watching the development with a great deal of interest. In terms of technology, the telecommunications world will be a very different place by the time that franchise rolls around for renewal.

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Nobody is forgetting that a huge amount of money is at stake.

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