VoIP spreads its wireless wings

BOSTON—The evolution of various access technologies based on 802.11 will have a profound effect on the way people communicate and have severe consequences for both telcos and cable operators in the next decade, according to Brough Turner, chief technology officer of NMS Communications.

“Wi-Fi is going to out-evolve everything,” he said during a speech at the Voice on the Net show here today. “That’s where the dollars are and that’s where the entrepreneurs are.”

For voice-over-IP players, many of whom are already looking at wireless as their next growth market, the developments will set them free of the duopoly that broadband has become. For the existing telcos and cable players, though, the bottleneck that they have on broadband access will disappear as innovators find ways around it, Turner said.

For telcos in particular, the end result will be a massive decrease in broadband revenues to go with already shrinking voice revenues. Cable operators will continue to feed off their video revenues but eventually those will decline as faster Wi-Fi technologies are deployed to handle video.

“I expect we will beat the access bottleneck in the next five to eight years,” he said. “In the future, [telcos] are going to lose their revenue to IP communications. Mobile voice over IP will be widely available in less than eight years.”