VoIP’s Death Debate is Missing the Point
The blogosphere has been buzzing about whether VoIP is dead, ever since Alec Saunders posted 2008: The Year that VoIP died on his blog, which lead to other posts, including a post by Om Malik on his GigaOM blog. Each has presented some interesting points though it’s a debate that I feel is missing the point.
The question itself is too focused on the idea of VoIP as a standalone application, isolated from all the other things that IP enables. That is completely unrealistic today, because of the way companies – and even consumers – are converging all their networks and applications onto a single IP-based network.
We have moved light years beyond the idea of thinking of VoIP as the sole reason for convergence. In that respect, the “V” in VoIP may very well be dead, but the “IP” is not only alive, but thriving. When you look at the myriad applications that are enabled or enhanced thanks to the IP infrastructure, you can see that voice is simply one of many.
Conferencing and collaboration, unified messaging, location-based services, instant messaging, and, yes, voice – these are all important applications that IP makes possible. If you look only at the voice application, it is easy to see that there isn’t a strong business case to be made for pursuing convergence just for voice. The return on investment just isn’t there, and in that sense, then, VoIP can be considered a dead issue.
But just as almost no one buys a mobile device today simply to make voice calls, no one is embracing IP for that reason either. It’s all about the broad range of applications that exist now and that will surely expand exponentially in the coming months and years. If anything, we should be talking about AoIP (Applications over IP) as an all-encompassing term instead of trying to limit the conversation to VoIP.
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SubscribeTags: collaboration, conferencing, IP, IP infrastructure, IP networking, location-based services, messaging, presence, VoIP
January 19th, 2009 at 6:48 pm
Great post Steve. Thanks.
January 21st, 2009 at 4:43 am
[...] The blogosphere has been buzzing about whether VoIP is dead, ever since Alec Saunders posted 2008: The Year that VoIP died on his blog, which lead to other posts, including a post by Om Malik on his GigaOM blog. …[Continue Reading] [...]
January 28th, 2009 at 8:43 am
[...] The Is-VoIP-Dead debate goes on, and it’s performing a valuable public service by making us all re-examine what VoIP was, what it is now, and how it fits into the AoIP (Applications over IP) concept that Steve Parrott talked about on January 19. [...]
February 3rd, 2009 at 3:02 pm
[...] is dead. Long live AoIP! The VoIP is dead topic has been well covered here (and here and here) already. I’m guessing if you’ve been paying attention to Seamless [...]
July 23rd, 2009 at 10:07 am
[...] McGuire 4. I am done with Web 2.0 (2/14) Glenn 5. VOIP is more than Plumbing (1/28) Ledgerwood 6. VOIP Death Debate is Missing the Point (1/19) Parrott 7. Pre Deserves its Post Announcement Buzz (5/26) Carter 8. What the Media is Saying [...]
November 13th, 2009 at 3:10 pm
[...] advanced IP-based applications. Steve Parrott had a good take on this, by the way, with his recent posting on AoIP (Applications over [...]