2 Comments

  1. To answer the question on money or profit, which I presume to be your real question, and service, I first direct you to the four applications of VoIP listed on the page http://www.occidental.com.au/voip.html I’m not sure how the carrier earns a profit, except, perhaps by advertising, but the ISPs benefit from longer connection times and persons being on the net to make and receive international calls when they otherwise wouldn’t be.

    Now, as for quality of service, if both parties are on broadband, it will probably be OK. But if someone’s on a 33.6 kbps dial up some distance from the main exchange using a discount ISP, stick to emails.

  2. My question really is this: eBay paid 2.6bn USD for Skype. Was it worth it? Sure, a nice little online community but who’s paying?

    What will carriers do when the backhaul (that last few meters to a real telephone) gets solved or becomes a non-problem? How will they charge for carrying IP traffic to the phone?

    If the software is free, the headsets cheap, and ISPs record voice traffic as data traffic (they don’t care if you are pirating music, hacking NASA or ringing Grandma in the UK) in an all-you-can-eat broadband package world, how do suppliers make money from VOIP?

    Sure, large companies will save money, Cisco will sell more of those cool phones they pay a fortune for product placement in movies, and 13 or 1800 numbers will be reduced as customers use Skype to contact Customer Service, but where is the actual hard currency in providing these services? I’m not saying VOIP won’t be huge, or that companies providing VOIP transition and migration strategies won’t do well – good luck to my mates at Gen-i VOIP services *waves* Hi Zen 🙂 – but when it comes to The Great Unwashed, they simply ain’t gonna pay for a VOIP-at-home service. True yah?

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