Covad Communications is offering its business customers the chance to experience the advantages of voice over Internet protocol without the capital cost of replacing their existing TDM phone equipment.

The Covad VoIP PBXi Voice Service offers lower-cost VoIP to businesses that already have PBXs or key systems in place and don’t want to invest again in IP gear, including new handsets.

The new offering is actually the first step in a migration path to hosted services, according to Jeffrey Ahlquist, vice president of corporate development for Covad.

“This is a large business in and of itself, but the more important element is to create a migration path for these customers so they don’t have to do a complete forklift to go to an IP service,” Ahlquist said. “To get them onto an IP connection allows us to migrate them to a true hosted platform. That’s the big value.”

Covad VoIP PBXi Voice Service allows customers to replace their T-1 links with less expensive IP connections and to integrate their voice and data services onto IP. They also have access to some VoIP features such as find me/follow me.

The next step for Covad will be to offer the PBXi customers the same dashboard that the company offers its VoIP customers, with a simple way to manage calls, set up hunt groups and integrate messaging such as voice mail. The company expects to have that part of the service in place by the first quarter of 2006.

The Covad VoIP PBXi service supports either analog or digital systems and comes in packages supporting bandwidth up to two T-1s.