VoIP Will Become the New Standard

This week's highlighted research:

IDC. "Home office households set the stage for consumer VoIP adoption."

Infonetics Research. "User plans for VoIP: North America 2006."

Juniper Research. "Global VoIP: Hosted & non-hosted services: Business & enterprise markets, 2006-2010."

We tend to be creatures of habit. We like to stick with the "same old same old" regardless of whether there's something better out there, proclaiming, "better the devil I know than the devil I don't know." Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) isn't exactly the devil, but it is something new, and it takes a lot to get telecom consumers to change their habits.

At this point, thanks to a combination of more refined technology and clever marketing, most consumers are aware of VoIP and believe it is a legitimate alternative. The early adopters of VoIP are the small offices and home offices, according to IDC, whose report notes that households with home offices have always been early adopters of advanced technology, and VoIP is no exception. Households with home offices are twice as likely to implement VoIP than other households, according to the report, which says that about 40 percent of corporate home offices, and 24 percent of home based businesses are interested in VoIP, while only about 11 percent of general households without home offices are interested.

Naturally, the biggest driver in VoIP implementation in home offices is cost savings on long distance. IDC's studies also note that the availability of other features, such as convergence with mobile phones, will also be a driving force in small office/home office implementation of VoIP.

VoIP is starting to go mainstream, says Infonetics Research, whose report notes that the number of small, medium, and large organizations planning to deploy VoIP continues to rise. Infonetics notes that many VoIP implementations are tied to organizations needing a new phone system, and when companies need new systems, they tend to invest in the latest technology -- and so new implementations are much more likely to be VoIP-based. Some companies are actually decommissioning their older TDM PBXes in favor of a pure VoIP environment, a factor that indicates that companies have confidence in the technology.

It only follows that VoIP deployments will increase as standard POTS decreases. Juniper Research notes that VoIP services will hit $18 billion by 2010, and this technology will dramatically reshape the communications business. And while VoIP revenues are increasing for providers who are in that business, on the other side of the equation there will be $36 million a year of lost revenue by 2010.