Time Warner today announced its Digitalphone Voice over IP
New York and New Jersey customers.
According to Howard Szarfarc, president of Time Warner Cable of New York & New Jersey,
TWC’s Digitalphone initiative is different from other VoIP-based businesses,
because it does not use the “public” Internet to make calls.
“Unlike others, Digitalphone is facilities based,” Szarfac said in a morning conference call.
“All the calls made remain on our own network or the network of our phone partner Sprint.
That allows us to make sure that our customers get the best possible experience and the most
reliable experience when making or receiving calls.”
Szarfarc explained the new service is enabled by TWC’s Hybrid Fibre Coaxial (HFC) network, which
is the backbone for its RoadRunner high-speed broadband, Video on
Demand (VoD) and Digital Video Recorder (DVR) services.
Digitalphone calls begin on the TWC network and travel to their regional data center in New York City.
Sprint then picks it up, completing the call across its network.
A particular draw for folks considering a leap to the new service is the fact that they
may keep their existing phone numbers and move them to Digitalphone.
“In fact, around the country in other Time Warner Cable Digitalphone markets over 90 percent choose
to keep their existing numbers for convenience,” Szarfac said.
The Digitalphone VoIP service is now available
in parts of Manhattan, Queens, Staten Island and Mt. Vernon, N.Y., with plans to roll it out
to its full service area by next summer.
Time Warner first rolled out
VoIP services to its Portland, Maine, customers in May 2003. Last December,
TWC announced that it
would be expanding the rollout to other markets in a triple play bundle of unlimited local,
in-state and domestic long distance services.
