VoIP grows up
This is exactly what corporate users have come to expect of the circuit switch network architecture PSTN. Needless to say, all these have made the PSTN to have a very high degree of network availability for many years even as it is still continuously changing and evolving.
Business cannot and will not survive without voice communication, that’s an undeniable fact. Many of us don’t give a dime when we can’t receive our e-mails. It’s like, yeah, so I can’t receive my e-mail, no problem, just have to wait a while more. But the moment that the telephone is down for just 1 hour, many of us will be tearing our hair off, panicking and start to get on each other’s nerves. The telephone is meant to work even if there is a power failure.
The point is this, whenever we want to get a message across, we talk, we communicate with our voices. While it may take a few minutes to a few days to get a reply from your e-mail which you have sent out, it takes only seconds for you to hear what the other party have to say. In other words, voice communication is still the fastest, though not necessary the cheapest or the most convenient ways of communication.
Growing up of VoIP
According to AT&T, Kishore Sanagapalli, Regional Director, Asia Pacific Offer Management, AT&T Global Network Services, he commented on an e-mail interview; “We feel that market for Internet telephony will be growing rapidly over the next 4 to 5 years. Our view is that the market share for International IP telephony will start growing from around 10% of the total voice spend in 2002 to around 30 to 40% of total voice spend in 2005. Whichever way you look at it, the simple message is that the forecast for IP telephony growth over the coming years is going to be very high”
The same sentiments are expressed by DGS Technology as well. “We are logically optimistic, as there are certainly abundant reasons to be. It is estimated that legacy PBX currently out-sell IP-PBX at approximately 20:1 ratio in North America. We expect this gap to be narrowed consistently and considerably in the next few years and the trend to spread quickly to the rest of the world. IP-PBX will likely gain market dominance in four or five years, by 2005 or 2006 [Philips InfoTech]” said Henry Chang, Marketing Manager, DSG Technology in a separate interview.
Frost & Sullivan, a customer focused marketing consulting company, has also revealed a trend which shows that VoIP services are bound to be a mainstream technology. In last year (2000) alone, the wholesale and retails world VoIP traffic volume exceeded 6 billion and 15 billion minutes respectively. Even though the grow rates will vary across world regions, VoIP will account for approximately 75 percent of world voice services by 2007.
According to the study by Frost & Sullivan, with the entrance of big telecommunications service providers like AT&T and MCI WorldCom, they will bring along with them, their resources and large customers bases, which will be the main driving factor for increased traffic volume growth, improvement of QoS, lobby for favorable regulatory treatment and heavy investment in infrastructure expansion.