Except for the clock tower and elevator overlooking Lake Union, there is nothing particularly noteworthy about the two-story building at 2100 Westlake Ave. N. in Seattle.
Yet this building, headquarters for Innovative Communications Technologies (ICT), is unique for what it doesn't have: There are no phone lines.
Calls made from the building are beamed from a dish on the roof to the Westin Building in downtown Seattle, where the company's equipment transmits the calls as packets of data across the country.
Fifteen miles away in Redmond, employees at BeComm, a fledgling software company, have thrown out their phones altogether. All of the company's communication needs--e-mail, phone, fax--are done solely via computer.
Welcome to the business office of the future, where the traditional phone call is a thing of the past. Thanks to advances in switching and routing technology, a phone call is indistinguishable from video, e-mail or Internet content. Such information can be digitized into packets and then transmitted across the country over a single fiber-optic line.
"Voice is merely data," said Barry Henthorn, ICT's chief executive officer. In the future, "Companies won't be selling just phone service or Internet access. They will be selling an allocation of bandwidth."
ICT's headquarters is outfitted to use the very technology, called Global Private Telecommunications Networks (GPTN), the company hopes to sell to customers who rack up expensive long-distance bills.
GPTN essentially acts as the caller's private phone network by eliminating the need for long-distance carriers.
Here is how it works: A phone call made in Seattle is digitized into a packet of information and then sent across a fiber-optic line ICT leases from companies such as Global Crossing; it then re-emerges as a local phone call in Boston.
"Our technology makes a call to the rest of the country look like a local phone call," said Henthorn.
ICT, he said, can save customers money by charging a flat rate instead of the traditional fee per minute long-distance carriers favor.
BeComm's office is also wired to the very product it has developed: the Strings operating system.
The goal of Strings, said Edward Ballassanian, BeComm's president and CEO, is to create a media hub that manages all of the digital information that is sent to a home or business.
With Strings, said Ballassanian, a worker can not only make phone calls over the Internet but also turn on a TV with a cell phone. By transmitting e-mail into voice data, employees can listen to their e-mail over the phone.
Both Henthorn and Ballassanian said it was important to test their technology on their employees before selling it to others.
A year ago, said Ballassanian, the company had a "telephone throwing-out party" when employees threw all of their phones into a garbage can. Ballassanian had challenged his employees to use the very technology they had bragged about.
It's a good thing they did, he said, because Strings did not work properly for a few months. As they worked out the system's kinks, workers found it hard to communicate.
Someone had thrown out all of their telephones.
From The Seattle Times,
By Thomas Lee
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