Level3 (NASDAQ: LVLT) announced earnings today. They also announced customer wins.
What Level3 is clearly doing is building upon their past, and in some cases, long term relationships in the data and streaming business are coming around to be VoIP customers. AOL’s Moviefone on VoIP means costs get lower for AOL. That’s really important for a company that is looking to leverage their exhaustive database and turn it from screen to voice for more than just movies. Think reservations for restaurants. Think buying tickets. Think airline reservations. IVR. AOL with Voice becomes a big player all of a sudden, as their customers are into simple, and nothing is easier than the spoken word.
Speech recognition is rapidly improving and with VoIP it becomes cheaper. With centralized processing inside the network, ala Level3, on a scalable, national platform, it becomes an amazing value proposition for AOL to go to market with.
Level3 also announced wins from Net2Phone, Skype, Tiscali, Teliris and 8×8. They didn’t announce Speakeasy, whose reps have told me they plan to roll out Level3, not Covad’s GoBeam.
Seems like Level3 is on a roll again…