Pan-European ISP Tiscali has teamed up with NetCentrex to provide residential broadband telephony services for its one million ADSL punters.
The deal was announced yesterday and should mean that punters in Italy could be in the position to make voice and video calls using their broadband service by the autumn.
A spokeswoman for Tiscali in the UK told The Register that the ISP is looking to introduce broadband telephony here sometime this year, although the move is dependent on network upgrades.
Separately, Ofcom, the UK's mega communications regulator yesterday launched a consultation to "determine the appropriate numbering resource for voice over broadband (VoB) services".
One of Ofcom's proposals is that VoB users employ "056" numbers.
Anyhow, if VoB rings your bell, then check out the consultation document here.
Oh, and while we're on the whole broadband thing, research commissioned by AOL UK predicts that home networking is set to be a 'must-have' for broadband users in 2004.
Over a third of the broadband users it questioned said they already had some form of home network, with a further two in ten saying that they were likely to set up a home network in the next 12 months.
Even though AOL UK predicts that home networking looks set to be big this year, the ISP warns that there are still considerable hurdles - namely, price of hardware and [lack of] ease of installation - to overcome before adoption becomes widespread. ®
