“VoIP is dead,” Skype General Manager of Voice and Video Jonathan Christensen declared at an industry conference a few weeks ago. He spoke figuratively, of course, but he may well have been right. While Voice-Over-Internet Protocol proponents had long promised a decade of creative destruction, they themselves appear to have become the victims.

Excerpted from and article by Ian Andrew Bell

http://gigaom.com/2008/11/02/who-killed-the-voip-revolution/

Here are some interested comments on that article…

I stated many times that VoIP is now “telephony” (I already said this during VON 2006). “Normal” people don’t care of what’s behind the scenes, just want to make phone calls. And Skype is a powerful application to communicate with each other, call it VoIP or XYZ, people don’t really care. When you watch a TV channel do you care what kind of technology is used to make it available to you? -luca Filigheddu

Yep Luca is correct, Having been selling voip to the enterprise market since late 90’s. 99% of endusers don’t care even 1% what the technology is, Just that it works. And it has to be as simple as plugging a normal phone into a Pots line. Some have got it that simple and they also dont even call it voip, They will be the survivors. Ones who make the big deal on the technology will whither and die. -Ian

I also think you can’t forget that many VOIP companies do not own the last mile to the customer. Combine this with the fact that the customer expects their VOIP line to sound exactly like a copper wire line. When it doesn’t, then they believe it’s the VOIP companies fault and leave. This leaves the provider in a difficult situation with attrition since they rely completely on the customer’s internet connection. These internet connections can fluctuate based time of day, or the wind pattern.-Marakush

As pointed out above, customers want solutions that work and are better (and in some cases cheaper) than the TDM/digital switches they use. Which is why they keep on buying Nortel, Avaya, Cisco, etc, because they work. Interoperability in this market is almost never a real requirement, particularly because the standards are constantly evolving and deploying a SIP system is still not as easy as plugging an analog phone into an RJ-11 socket.  - Alex

“VOIP” as a technology is no more or less dead than “TCP/IP” is dead. It is getting embedded throughout. There used to be a time where companies were able to make money selling TCP/IP stacks too. It is an “incremental” technology over an TCP/IP framework and will be sold the same way. No wonder then that the usual suspects are the leaders in selling VOIP equipment and services as well.

Cost of long distance have been dropping anyway, down to a penny per minute in bulk, and the cost savings as part of an overall budget of a person or company are minuscule. I have a land line today and it works just fine - not something I lose sleep over. Yes, I save $15/mo, say with Vonage, than an all you can eat plan with AT&T - but as part of my overall spending on rent and salaries and so on - that is not the first place I look at to save some money.

As an enterprise, if it is easy to move to VOIP, I will go for it but if it requires me to do a massive transition and/or a forklift upgrade then I wont see any payback for 2-3 years compared to my already paid for legacy PBX infrastructure.

The best case for VOIP as a replacement technology is in (1) Greenfield deployments - people making choices for new deployments now and (2) Upgrades - companies who are due for retiring old equipment. Some speculate that this happens every 7-8 years and after the Y2K replacements it is overdue. However, with the current economy every one is going to be looking to stretch out their capital investments as long as they can.

So as a pure replacement strategy, VOIP is in for a tough time.

However, the true value of VOIP is as part of a unified communication strategy that is integrated with business processes that are communication dependent (customer support, work flow etc). There it is doing well, just not as visible to a lay caller.-Ernest Nova

VOIP is everywhere - you just don’t see it. The telcos have widely appropriated the technological evolution to lower their costs and therefore deprive the new entrants of a massive cost advantage. Now with the IMS architecture, we are finally seeing the telcos make IP based services the core of their infrastructure… We were talking about it ten years ago (myself as a naïve starry eyed beginner consultant…) and it is now about to become reality. IMS will let the telcos use VOIP to match the feature set of services in the open world and supplement them with proprietary network-related capabilities that will set the apart. With the mobile network as a barrier to entry, the strong are only growing stronger.-Jean-Marc Liotier

And last but not the least…

Offering stuff free on the internet may just well prove to be the original sin, as we are seeing with the impending doom of journalism.-Amish

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