KICKING VoIP TO THE CURB

In the short span of two years, voice-over-IP service has gone from being the hottest thing on the market to the brink of irrelevancy. That's not to say that IP voice is a thing of the past — far from it — but voice is rapidly being transformed into just another application in the flow of network packets.

A recent InStat report stated that 73% of the consumers buying voice did so without making a conscious choice about a technology change.

It's a little like going from star soprano to just another voice in the chorus. Or, more aptly, from leggy high school beauty queen to one of the Rockettes — still talented and beautiful but hard to pick out in the crowd and more valuable as part of the whole.

Service providers must recognize this change because of what it means to their marketing efforts. If VoIP always needed to be sold on its merits, not its technologies, at least there was some street buzz, so to speak, to help carry the day. That silence you are hearing is the death of the VoIP buzz.

In North America, the cable industry had much to do with making VoIP irrelevant. Large cable operators have been very aggressive — and quite successful — selling voice as an application in a triple-play service without identifying its source technology. If anything, the cable industry tried to downplay the VoIP angle. Outside the U.S., other broadband providers have done the same thing — in some parts of Asia, voice service is the free add-on.

The bottom line is that consumers don't care about VoIP — they care about value, quality and ease of use of new applications. As long as a service provider is delivering those, the underlying technology matters little, if at all.