Like most things in technology, VoIP was talked about for years before it became a part of the enterprise mainstream. The opposite, it seems, is the case with VoIP services. While Vonage and Net2Phone have been around for a few years, of late they and their competitors have been blasted into public view advertising like mad around the Web, as well as on traditional media such as TV. And soon, they’ll go after you.
While VoIP services have been targeted at the mass consumer market, many of the companies have rapidly expanded their purview to include “business-class” services. So ready or not, you’ll be hearing from them.
Who are these companies and what are the services they offer? Well, the list reads like one of those many ancestry sections of the Bible, but you might as well get a feel for the onslaught. For many of these companies, the service and the company names are identical. So I’ll only list the vendor (in parenthesis) where the two differ – in the official order they were stumbled upon by yours truly.
Prepare to grapple with Vonage, Lingo (Primus), Skype, Net2Phone, Packet8 (8×8), SIPphone, CallVantage (AT&T), VoiceWing (Verizon), BroadVoice, VoicePulse. Even vendors that traditionally have focused on selling hardware have gotten into the fray – Belkin is offering a VoIP service under the callEverywhere brand.
And there are many more. A quick search while writing this piece brought me links to VoIPWorX, Dialpad, FWD, Covad – it goes on and on. (I apologize in advance to the myriad companies I’ve failed to mention.)
The services are what you might expect: the ability to make and receive calls using your broadband Internet connection. Most of the services have pretty impressive lists of advanced options, including voice mail, conference calling, find me and integrated fax support.
What do they want from you? For starters, they’ll take your small remote offices. You know, the ones that look remarkably like the homes they’re targeting already. For these sites that don’t have a physical PBX, they provide, in essence, a virtual PBX replete with all the advanced functions you’d expect.
Their arguments are compelling financially. At a minimum, your smallest one-person office is likely running telco services that consist of a broadband connection, at least one voice trunk and a fax number. Monthly connection charges can be pushing $75 with usage layered on top of that.
Using a VoIP service, you can, for example, get 500 minutes of U.S. and Canada calls for a total of $14.99 per month. Adding a fax line bumps it up $10. Pretty impressive.
In the past, a major disincentive to move services would be the implicit cost of having all your contacts need to reach you at a new number. And along with that, the need to update stationery, Web pages, business cards and so forth. Now that you can take your number with you, a major stumbling block is removed.
About the only thing that you can’t get with these new VoIP services is your traditional enhanced 911 service. It exists, but with caveats. You have to register the physical location of your phone (and re-register if and when you move it) so the authorities know where to dispatch help; and, obviously, if your broadband is down, your E911 vanishes.
We’ve already started benchmarking voice quality of a number of these services and, overall, the results are impressive (read the report ). Services are probably in your future.
