on VoIP
Market Penetration Obstacles
In his presentation to the FCC mentioned above, Mr. Pulver also mentioned obstacles to market penetration. Some of the obstables in 2003 have been overcome (NAT/firewall traversal, for example, although several different standards of doing this exist today). However, some of the obstacles in 2003 still exist today. I’ll delve into four or five here.
Reliability
Ask someone about transitioning to VoIP, and they’re likely to ask about two things: Reliability and Quality. We’ll start with the former.
Ring Tone is taken as a given to everyone but the phone company. Internet access–not so much. Although even home DSL lines are becoming more reliable, Ma Bell has set the expectation for phone reliability bar pretty high. What further complicates matters is that there are multiple players that can mess up a perfectly good VoIP call. I’ll take myself as an example. My VoIP provider is Broadvoice. Let’s assume my DSL provider is speakeasy. My telephone line (over which the DSL rides) is Verizon. If I have a problem, whom do I call? (Or did iTunes decide that the best time to download some 57MB podcast is right in the middle of a telephone call?! Let’s add Steve Jobs to the mix.) This “many heads” problem is going away with some of the “all in one” packages that are becoming popular. I don’t think there’s an easy solution to this, but I fear it’s going to be something we are increasingly learning to live with.
Lastly, there is power. The power seems to fail more frequently than the PSTN telephone line. With VoIP, if you can’t power your DSl modem, Router, ATA, etc, then you have no phone.
Quality
A lot of bad publicity has plagued VoIP in the past. And perhaps it continues to be plagued by promises of cheap phone calls. (Why does nobody advertise how good the quality is instead?! ) But here is an interesting piece of information: In a test, people over a certain age thought VoIP quality was bad, as they compared it to their traditional PSTN phones. On the other hand, the younger generation almost universally thought quality was “good”, compared to cellphones.
Quality of a good VoIP call is at a minimum acceptable. The problems start when the underlying internet connection starts to act up, especially with asymetric DSL that push high download speeds, but limit upload to a few hundred KBs.
Broadband availability
Almost everyone has broadband today, at least in any sizeable city. But that broadband is usually DSL, provided over the existing telephone line. So, if you have to pay for the telephone line anyway, why would you pay for a second (VoIP) line? A few providers are starting to offer standalone DSL lines now, which is a move in the right direction. However, see the earlier note on asynchronous DSL.
Marketing
I’ve touched on this, so I’ll be brief.
First, note that Cox no longer calls it VoIP. Their offering is now “Packet Switched” product. (They also do some stuff diffferently from traditional VoIP providers, since the VoIP traffic does not share much with normal IP traffic.)
Some others find that people are more receptive if they call the product “Digital phone” or something similar. (Vonage uses “internet phone”. Broadvoice and Verizon VoiceWing still use “VOIP” on their literature.)
It seems that the product has to be emphasized, not the type of service. People currently do not know, nor care, what type of network or wire their telephone uses. It’s a phone. It’s not a voice-over-the-public-switched-telephone-network-device.
Regulatory concerns
This is not really an issue. Most regulatory restrictions have either been addressed overcome, or are closed to being resolved.
Standard compliance and compatibility
This is a small issue, as with all new protocols–devices pop up that are protocol-compliant but not compatible with other compliant devices. This is mostly an issue for the VoIP providers, not the end-users.