Howard Jonas, IDT"s CEO and Founder came up with a way of providing the world with cheap international long distance calling rates.
His tiny International Discount Telecommunications Corp. pioneered what is now a multi-billion dollar a year industry, international "callback" telephone service. This technology allows anyone around the world to bypass the high costs of placing international calls from countries outside of the US. Callback gives the caller the ability to make the international call as if he/she was calling from the US. Today, IDT offers telephone service to customers in over 225 countries worldwide.
One of the main divisions if IDT is Net2phone. Excite has recently signed a two year agreement with Net2phone to bring internet phone to various counties in Europe and Japan. Net2Phone enables Internet users to place calls to any telephone in the world via the Internet, the company said. Excite said that the Net2Phone icon will be integrated through many of its channels, giving customers a one-click access to download the service, subscribe, and make calls anywhere in the world. Recipients of the call need not be online, as calls are routed directly to traditional telephones. Because calls are placed through the Internet, phone rates are not based on the country of origin, but on the pricing structure set by IDT, which, according to Excite, is low-cost.
Excite said it is also planning to offer a click to dial service, by fully incorporating Net2Phone into Excite's personalized directory. IDT has also emerged as one of the nation"s fastest growing Internet access providers, offering dial-up access to over 80,000 customers nationwide as well as dedicated access to hundreds of corporate customers. Through the build out of its own infrastructure, IDT now has one of the nation"s largest networks providing local dial-up Internet access through more than 600 points of presence and a top rated DS3 backbone. IDT has been selected as a new top-level Internet domain name registrar, although there is no guarantee that if you register a name with them you will get it. Even if you do get the name you pick, it may be useless.
IDT was among two dozen U.S. companies and fewer than 100 companies worldwide chosen as a registrar as part of the Internet Assigned Number Authority sponsored expansion of the Internet domain name system. IANA is the central coordinator for the assignment of unique numbers every machine on the Internet needs to be found by user machines, and formed the Council of Registrars (CORE), a committee that's been studying a new domain name system and may itself become the successor to the InterNIC. The InterNIC registers domain names under a National Science Foundation Contract awarded to Network Solutions Inc.
IDT has seen an enormous amount of growth in recent years. With Net2phone, web domain sales, international calling plans and other services IDT has become recognized as a growing multi million dollar company. It has seen much prosperity and shows no signs of slowing down.
