This is a really good point that I whole-heartedly agree with:
VoIP isn’t the reinvention of the telephone which we all foresaw five years ago. At least, not the VoIP peddled by the likes of Vonage. It’s ordinary telephone service… delivered on IP. While popular, it has failed to deliver the revolution industry types envisioned. ”Innovations” like web-based dashboards are long in the tooth, and the truly revolutionary applications which could have been delivered have never seen the light of day.
It’s time to stop talking about VoIP as a business category, or an industry. Companies using VoIP to deliver service to customers are really just one more instance of a competitive service provider, albeit with different tarrifing and competition rules. Viewed from that vantage point, it’s no wonder that this “industry” is struggling.
Yes, the early entrants into the IP telephony service business attempted to mimick the phone company rather than outfox them, and they didn’t make a whole lot of money as a result. Consider my definition of VoIP, taken from my book Switching to VoIP, which was published in 2005. This definition was probably written in mid 2004, so you can see how far back the exciting/disruptive theme goes (even earlier, really):
VoIP is a disruptive technology family that promises to revolutionize the way we communicate, while driving decreases in the cost of that communication and icreases in the speed, reliability, and availability of the Internet itself.
And while I think the latter has come to pass in some areas (ie. Comcast customer calling to complain because their cable Internet is down and their Vonage quit working as a result), the other ideals in this definition are still far from reality today in 2Q 2007.
VoIP has been as disruptive to TDM voice about as much as PCS was disruptive to cellular. The change in transport turned out to be about as innovative as the change in encoding/frequency. Hopefully someone (Alec’s getting close) will grasp that it’s about the context before and after the call that VoIP really provides the framework for innovation around. Sort of like the context of mobility that PCS never really took off with.
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