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Web users soon can stop busy signals
By EVE TAHMINCIOGLU © St. Petersburg Times, published November 27, 1998 Next year, GTE Corp.'s Internetworking division plans to introduce a telephone service that will give customers who are online the option of taking those calls. The service is called Internet Call Waiting and GTE expects to offer the service to its customers nationally by mid-1999. Here's how it works. If you are online scanning stocks or sending flowers to a sick friend when a call comes in, a dialogue box showing the phone number and name of the caller will appear on the computer screen. By clicking the mouse on the appropriate icon you can: A. Answer the call and drop your Internet connection. B. Ignore the call and let voice mail pick up while you stay online. C. Forward the call to another number -- a cellular phone, for example. The service is the brainchild of InfoInterActive Inc. in Halifax, Nova Scotia, which started offering Internet Call Manager in Canada in 1997. GTE's call-waiting option will be based on InfoInterActive's system software, said John Vincenzo, a spokesman for GTE Internetworking. "We've taken their technology and made our service off of that," he said. Vincenzo would not say how much the service may cost. "We're still in the process of figuring that out," he said. "We will talk to our customers and see what works and what they're willing to pay." So far, only Cincinnati Bell Telephone and Chicago's Ameritech Corp. offer the service. Michael Smith, InfoInterActive's executive vice president, said customers typically pay $7 to $8 a month. The software is free. In the Tampa Bay area, the cost of a second line from GTE -- the largest phone provider in the region and the second largest in Florida -- is $55 plus $11.81 a month for basic service. "For a lot of folks, the cost of a second line is the start of a lot of new spending" they may not be able to afford, Smith said. He estimates that about 83 percent of homes in North America have one phone line, and those who use the Internet regularly miss 75 percent to 80 percent of incoming calls. With the new service, he said, "If you've got a teenager surfing the Internet, with one click the phone rings in the living room and the Net's disconnected."
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here may soon be a new option for Tampa Bay area consumers who cannot afford a second telephone line but are tired of missing calls while they surf the Web.
