VOIP isn't stagnant Period!

I was really surprised when a fellow blogger commented that VoIP is stagnant. Much of the article is based on the fact that VoIP services do not essentially "talk" to each other even after 2-3 years and that two VoIP services often require a PSTN to complete a call. This is definitely not the reason to conclude that VoIP is stagnant.

Every product has a distinct life cycle. VoIP is still in the growth phase and there are competing products like cell phones, traditional telcos, etc. The stakes are very high for both the competing parties and almost nothing for the VoIP Company. At one point of time the entire value of AT&T could be captured in the amount of copper cable they had put. The traditional telephone companies and the mobile phone companies have invested huge sums in their infrastructure. Now when they want to recover their investments, they see a competing technology and they would obviously try to stop the growth of the VoIP to generate some more revenues out of their network, before VoIP becomes commonplace.

As for lack of interface between any two VoIP providers like Vonage and Skype (a Skype call to a Vonage customer has to be routed through the traditional phone network), let the readers be aware that interconnect was an issue even for the traditional phone companies. Given a choice, incumbents would always want to prevent the growth of any new competition. The dispute between TTSL & Reliance Infocomm is a case in point. It is in these situations that the regulators step in to facilitate interconnection. In a traditional setup, probably one regulator can handle the situation as the players are governed by the regulator. But that is not true in case of VoIP. There is no regulator for VoIP and hence disputes in this area will take its own sweet time to be resolved. For a comparison, look at the interconnect arrangements in case of international roaming, which is not regulated and hence it is not essential that you will be able to make calls to all the phones in the world.

It took almost 90 years, after the first call made by Alexander Bell in 1915 for our telecom infrastructure to evolve to this standard and we are still not happy with it. VoIP has hardly been here. Just because you are able to write about it, does not make it a less complex industry. It has the complexities of any other industry and it does not have a regulator to resolve them. So please, give it some time and please stop making a knee jerk conclusion.

Rest assured that VoIP is here to stay and is evolving at a very fast rate. The numbers speak for themselves. A new bill plans to allow direct access to VoIP companies to the 911 systems. All these acknowledge the strength of VoIP. It is quite possible that both (the traditional companies and the VoIP) would cohabit and evolve a symbiotic relation in the future.

Probably the heading was to gather some traffic but I could not stop myself from reacting. Any comments?

This article is written by our VoIP news editor Alok R. Saboo. Alok is pursuing his PhD in Marketing at the Pennsylvania State University.