VoIP is quickly gaining popularity as companies and telephone providers make the full switch to VoIP, the potential for VoIP technology's use today is already quite astounding.
I also have a business line at home supplied by Vonage, which uses voice over Internet protocol, or VoIP, technology.
Most recently, companies like Vonage of Edison, N.J., and Primus Telecommunications of McLean, Va., have set up local phone services in Canada using VoIP technology.
Industry analysts have been closely watching the growth of the VoIP technology and its potential effect on the major phone companies with huge networks of phone lines.
In France, 8.5 million households, about a third of those in the country, use VoIP technology to make calls, Infocom said.
"VoIP technology has the potential to do to wireline carriers what file sharing is doing to the recording industry," John Hodulik, who follows telecommunications for UBS, wrote in a recent report to investors.
Not only is it now being hollowed out by VoIP technology; it has also been upstaged in recent years by the mobile phone, a far more glamorous, capable and personal device.
Voice-data convergence can cut operating costs, but the same VoIP technology is also eroding revenues from traditional fixed-line telephony, and new revenues from broadband will not fill the gap.
Companies are not ripping out their old phone systems to buy VoIP technology, but they are using it to replace outdated gear, link up greenfield sites and establish temporary offices, says Margaret Hopkins of Analysys, a consultancy.
But it need not be bad news for his company, he insists, because to make mobile VoIP calls subscribers will still need to pay for access to a high-speed wireless network, which is exactly what mobile operators provide.Indeed, operators might embrace mobile VoIP technology themselves, as the cheapest way to offer unlimited calls.
And as computing becomes ever more network-dependent, there are more opportunities for network operators to offer new data services.Perhaps the best illustration of this convergence of telecoms and IT is the growing practice of carrying voice calls over corporate data networks, using voice-over-internet-protocol (VoIP) technology.
