Public Telephone Services
In the U.S., the Bell Operating Companies and their cellular divisions had been prohibited by the FCC from offering voice-mail and other enhanced services such as paging and telephone answering services (no such prohibition existed in foreign countries). A ruling by Judge Harold H. Greene on March 7, 1988 removed this barrier and allowed the BOCs to offer voice-mail service, however they were not alloweed to design or manufacture equipment used to provide voice-mail services.
The opportunity created by the Greene decision, plus Voice-mail International's abandonment of its market lead for carrier grade systems, created a new opportunity for competing manufacturers and those who had been focusing on the corporate market. Unisys, Boston Technology, and Comverse Technology were quick to address the BOC and PTT marketplace. Octel, who had high capacity systems in use interally by all seven Regional Bell Operating companies, launched a new generation of its large system specifically designed for carriers and was compliant with "NEBS standards," the tight standard required by phone companies for any equipment located in their central offices.
While Unisys evetually secured PacBell's residential voice-mail services, Boston Technology became the mainstay of Bell Atlantic's residential voice-mail offering and Comverse Technology enjoyed some success in the European market; Octel became the world's leading provider of voice-mail platforms for virtually all of the major US wireless carriers (including the seven RBOCs, AT&T Wireless and McCaw), Canadian cellular carriers and a large percent of the GSM carriers around the world.
However it didn't take long for Comverse to become the largest supplier to the BOCs and PTTs with Lucent/Octel holding its leadership in the corporate market and second place with carriers. Boston was eventually acquired by Comverse making it the second largest supplier to carriers after Octel. Comverse today retains its leadership of legacy voice-mail systems sold to carriers around the world. Ericsson claims market leadership for IP based systems for its Ericsson Messaging-over-IP (MoIP) solution.
Read more about this topic: Voice-mail
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