Is Hosted Telephony Dying?

We’ve heard a lot of hype in the last few years about hosted IP-PBXs, IP-Centrex, and other similar services. However, this “jumbo-jet” passel of services has yet to make it off the ground. An important question remains in my mind: will IP-Centrex and hosted telephony EVER make it off the ground? When considering telephony in a SMB environment, less is usually better than more. Less infrastructure, up-front-costs and capital investment, etc. But, where is the tradeoff? Is it worth sacrificing call quality, ease-of-use, and sustainability to outsource your PBX? I don’t buy it. As much as we all have become accustomed to the computing-cloud and hosted mentalities (think Salesforce.com and Gmail), hosted ‘voice’ is another consideration. Application-level hosted services such as those named above are not nearly as sensitive to network, especially WAN-based problems, such as jitter and packet loss. Unfortunately, large-scale (multi-trunk) hosted telephony has more QoS-based requirements than other hosted platforms. Do businesses trying to capitalize on the IP-Centrex and hosted telephony markets realize this? As much as we would like, the Internet is not a perfect place. There’s a lot of infrastructure that we don’t have control over, between our office and our upstream hosting-provider. (See my post titled “Throughout Every Layer”): http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/26576 Until we can get a very stable, fast, and high QoS environment to transport voice and other real-time applications, we’re in some trouble. One trunk of voice may be fine quality-wise, but can you multiply that by factors of ten, or one-hundred?