MESSAGE
| DATE | 2005-04-03 |
| FROM | Ruben Safir Secretary NYLXS
|
| SUBJECT | Subject: [hangout] VoIP/ Web Browser
|
Enterprise VOIP-zilla?
By Eric H. Krapf
My daughter was born in 2000, just as the Internet party was winding
down. She grew fast that first year, as babies do, and my wife and I
wonderedas parents dohow big shed end up. Back in 2000, many of us were
still hearing, echoing in our brains, the predictions of Net boosters
concerning the growth of the Internet. These predictions always seemed
to begin, If the Internet continues growing at its current pace And I
would think to myself: If my daughter continues growing at her current
pace Visions of Reebzilla the giant toddler, literally bursting through
the roof of the house. The point, of course, is that industries, like
humans, grow in their infancy at unsustainably high rates. On the Internet
question, our columnist at Business Communications Review magazine, Peter
Sevcik, did yeomans service in painstakingly debunking the forecasts of
the Net boosters.
But now the hype is back, and its all about VOIP. Jeffrey Citron,
the CEO of Vonage, said this week that his company is adding 15,000
subscribers a week. CNET News quoted Citron as saying, Do the math, and
its easy to see where well be by years end. That is to say, continuing
to add subscribers at the current rate would put Vonage at more than 1
million customers by the end of 2005.
Im not inclined to question this specific prediction (or suggestion of
a prediction). Its short-term, and I assume Citron has good visibility
(remember that word?) as to what his business is likely to achieve over
the next nine months. So Ill stipulate: Vonage could well have 1 million
customers by year-end.
Then the question becomes: So what?
CNETs article noted that Vonage is adding more subscribers per week than
is the entire cable industry. That fact, however, is not as impressive as
it seems, and it does, in fact, reveal something about residential VOIP.
While the perception may be that cable VOIP offerings are now ubiquitous,
thats really not the casefar from it. Comcast, for example, wont offer
voice ubiquitously in its serving areas until the end of 2006. The company
is in trials, headed toward launch, in only three cities: Philadelphia,
Indianapolis and Springfield, MA. Thats projected to expand to 20 markets,
passing 15 million homes, by the end of this year.
Im not questioning the likelihood that cable companies will use VOIP
to take a chunk of the residential voice market away from the telephone
companies. (Comcasts goal is 20 percent penetration five years out from
market entry.) Im not even doubting that Vonage will get its taste.
But the vast majority of the residential voice market will continue to
be circuit-switched for years to come. The telcos, which will continue
to own that vast majority, have no reason to migrate off their legacy
platforms, and they wont do it.
Why does that matter? Because it means that the place where voice
technology will be least interesting over the next several years is in
the residential wireline marketplace.
By the time Comcast has its VOIP service available to all subscribers,
shipments of VOIP endpoints to the enterprise will outnumber TDM shipments
by 50 percent, according to Allan Sulkin, our PBX guru.
Enterprises will also be ahead on the innovation curve. Enterprises want
and need a reasonbeyond priceto adopt VOIP. I saw at last months VoiceCon
that theyre looking for those reasons: As Ive pointed out before, the
hot sessions at VoiceCon were the ones about SIP and applications.
Enterprises, while not price-insensitive, have other motivations, not
the least of which is that VOIP systems are the only kind that anyone
is trying to sell them. If youre an enterprise, buying TDM VOIP may now
be the riskier choice; such is not the case for a residential customer.
The residential market, on the other hand, is price-sensitive. Residential
customers are looking to VOIP services because they want to save
money. They want to make free calls over the Internet.
Finally, the other thing thats transforming the voice marketplace has
nothinginherentlyto do with IP. Im talking about wireless, in all its
forms, with all its implications: From total landline substitution on
the consumer side to the full range of application and device convergence
thats occurring in the enterprise.
Here again, the consumer market is much more likely to remain on new
iterations of traditional (i.e., cellular) platforms, while the enterprise
will move more quickly to 802.11-based IP systemsthough this distinction
matters less in a wireless world where new applications are driving the
market across all platforms.
I guess what Im saying is that, all in all, the enterprise is where its
at today in voice.
What do you think? Drop me a note in the VoiceCon Enews Forum.
------------------------------------ Eric H. Krapf is the Editor of
Business Communications Review and the Program Chair of the VoiceCon
Fall 2005 conference. Each week, the VoiceCon Enews newsletter (which
this column originally appeared in) presents opinions and analysis of
the trends in enterprise voice technologies. Our point of view is simple:
No hype, just information that network and communications professionals
like you can use. We've been doing this for more than three decades in
the pages of Business Communications Review magazine. We encourage you
to share VoiceCon Enews with your colleagues. They can sign up for their
own copy on the VoiceCon home page at http://www.voicecon.com.
-- __________________________ Brooklyn Linux Solutions
So many immigrant groups have swept through our town that Brooklyn, like
Atlantis, reaches mythological proportions in the mind of the world -
RI Safir 1998
DRM is THEFT - We are the STAKEHOLDERS - RI Safir 2002
http://fairuse.nylxs.com
http://www.mrbrklyn.com - Consulting http://www.inns.net <-- Happy
Clients http://www.nylxs.com - Leadership Development in Free Software
http://www2.mrbrklyn.com/resources - Unpublished Archive or stories and
articles from around the net http://www2.mrbrklyn.com/downtown.html -
See the New Downtown Brooklyn....
____________________________
NYLXS: New Yorker Free Software Users Scene
Fair Use -
because it's either fair use or useless....
NYLXS is a trademark of NYLXS, Inc
|
|
