Jonathan Christensen, GM of Skype audio and video recently declared VoIP is dead. Ian Andrew Bell asks ‘Who killed the VoIP revolution’ in GigaOM.
I don’t think VoIP is dead, here is why:
Enterprise vs. Consumer:
Although VoIP has not caught up in the consumer markets as well as traditional PSTN networks have, we can’t turn away from all the transformations happening in the Enterprise with VoIP/SIP. Almost every offshore center in India with headquarters stateside has a VoIP line for the employees; that translates to a lot of cost savings if you know what an international call costs today across the atlantic or pacific. Contact center applications like dialers, call distribution systems, even CRMs today have a VoIP integration feature that they want customers to embrace. Tringme, Jajah, and Ribbit still have solid business plans.
The problem is with consumers who haven’t embraced VoIP as they did with PSTN networks in the mid-to-late 1900s. Fundamentally, communication is taking a different shape, text messages and instant messaging is the most widely used messaging platform at least with the younger generation.
So VoIP still lives in enterprises and will continue to thrive.
Emerging Markets:
VoIP to TDM calls in the US is legal, but adoption is low on the VoIP phone services. People only tend to use their VoIP calls from mobile phones when mobile reception is bad.
I don’t know if VoIP is legal in China with the largest population in the world, but I know for sure that it is not legal in India yet. TRAI recently recommended that VoIP – TDM calls be allowed within India and the effect of this is going to be tremendous. We are talking 8~10million new mobile subscribers a month, and with mobile VoIP applications like tringme already available for free, we should wait and watch what the effect is when VoIP to TDM calls are legalized in India for local and long distance usage.
VoIP in applications:
Did you know that Ribbit for SalesForce lets you make voice calls to contacts on the CRM through VoIP? As more and more applications begin integrating voice communications, VoIP will gain solid ground.
So, no one killed the VoIP revolution, in my opinion!
