In the spring of 1998 ITXC carried 47,000 minutes of phone calls in a quarter. A year later it carried over 11 million. The Princeton, New Jersey company ran a wholesale network that moved voice calls over the internet instead of costly international phone lines. Phone companies handed it their traffic and paid less to reach far-off countries. Tom and Mary Evslin had founded it only two years before it went public in September 1999.

A Couple and a Network

Tom Evslin and his wife, Mary, started ITXC in July 1997 with seed money from AT&T and the Israeli internet phone company VocalTec. Their network, ITXC.net, linked gateways around the world that turned voice into data packets and back again. A carrier in one country passed a call to ITXC, which delivered it to a local partner at the other end. Calls to places with high international rates were where the savings were biggest.

Wholesale Voice, Sold Again

ITXC priced its offering at $12 a share in September 1999 and listed on Nasdaq under the ticker ITXC. Traffic kept growing as internet calling moved from novelty to normal, while prices per minute kept falling. In November 2003 ITXC agreed to merge with Teleglobe, an international carrier, and Tom Evslin was named non-executive chairman of the combined company. The deal closed in 2004.

Cover: The Cry, Eugène Carrière. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for a voice crying out (calls carried across the world).