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July 14, 2004
IP Or Circuit Voice?
Posted by Dana Blankenhorn
The debate over Voice Over IP is intensifying.
The debate currently involves two questions. If we lose circuit switched voice in favor of IP voice, what about the taxes circuits were paying? And which sounds better?
These are the wrong questions, says Brad Templeton. (That's Brad, to the left, from his home page.)
On this I agree with him 100%, and his words bear repeating.
"If VoIP is just to be PSTN (Public Switched Telephone Network) over IP at a lower cost (or worse, POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) over IP as it is in some cases) then it's boring and barely worth doing.
"What's interesting is new stuff."
Templeton adds that he's working on some "new stuff" himself (good luck, Brad), but it's easy to understand what such "new stuff" may consist of:
- Voice integrated with video.
- Voice integrated with whiteboards.
- Voice over the Web, with video inside a shared Web page.
- Better voice than you can get from a phone, which can be recorded digitally and played over the radio.
- Voice integrated with transcription, for taking testimony.
That list took about five minutes to come up with. I'll bet, if you put on your thinking cap, you can come up with a longer list, a better list, maybe even an item or two that no one has thought of, something that might make you a fortune. Maybe both you and Brad can bring your new stuff to market and get rich. (When you do buy me a drink.)
And that is what makes Voice Over IP important.
Comments (1)
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Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for over 25 years and has covered the online world professionally since 1985. He founded the "Interactive Age Daily" for CMP Media, and has written for the Chicago Tribune, Advertising Age, and dozens of other publications over the years.
1. jeff trimble on July 19, 2004 05:08 PM writes...
I'm going to offer a mildly discenting opinion. I will conceed that the more "interesting" discussions are about what nifty stuff voice over IP will let us do. But I have to say that dismissing taxes and voice quality out of hand is impractical and probably unfair.
Actually, it's the taxes i care about. Dependence on celluar tech has proven that phone users will accept a reasonably low audio quality for mundane voice communications. But traditional phone carriers are faced with a number of fees that VOIP carriers are not. These include not only national and regional taxes but often requirements that they provide phone service to rural areas that are not financially profitable. VOIP carriers have no such obligations.
I'm not advocating throwing a bunch of fees at VOIP carriers "to make things fair." But I think asking those questions goes right along with discussing the possible evolution or extinction of the telephone as we know it today.
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