Ericsson and MCI Inc. today announced an agreement to deploy Ericsson's Engine solution to migrate MCI's US-based international gateway traffic from traditional circuit switching to carrier-class Voice over IP (VoIP).

Building on its domestic VoIP migration plans, announced in June 2003, MCI has become one of the first U.S.-based service providers to provision the transition of its international voice service to its core IP backbone. Already well into the deployment of Ericsson's latest generation voice switching platform into the network, MCI
expects to begin transitioning traffic by mid 2005.

The reasons for the migration to an all IP backbone are simple:
1) It enables MCI to flexibly and cost-effectively converge international voice services onto its IP backbone to optimize the network.
2) It increases efficiency and realizes operational savings while providing more value and feature offerings (such as "follow me") to customers.
3) By having a 100% IP core, MCI can become a "true" international phone company offering phone service throughout the world. The deltathree's of the world better watch their back!

What I find interesting is that recently AT&T announced very strong "VoIP plans" - to be at the very core of their offerings, and now another major carrier, MCI has done the same. In other words, VoIP isn't just a disruptive technology - it's a revolution! If you don't see that by now you must be blind!