Brad Ideas - Down with PoIP - Comments

Bill Campbell — Thu, 22 Jul 2004 02:17:03 -0700

Hey Brad,

You really got this one right!!!

You make an very important point and you did it well.

Thank you.

Regards,

Bill

Paul — Tue, 20 Jul 2004 14:26:08 -0700

I'm missing what you think VoIP should be. Do you align with one of these: http://www.fcc.gov/voip/materials-view.html ?

One of my previous jobs was in VoIP development with a major telecom equipment vendor. And at this point the easiest way forward for the technology has been stealthy: various carriers are using VoIP in their backbones, but not making it visible to their customers. See other FCC discussion on VoIP tariffing for examples.

As the opportunities and risks are better understood, additional interfaces can be made public and additional services can be made available. If we move too quickly all we'll get is the telephony version of email: free spam.

Templeton: Down with PoIP

Alec Saunders .LOG — Tue, 20 Jul 2004 00:41:32 -0700

Trackback from Alec Saunders .LOG:Down with PoIP ....

Down with PoIP

brad — Mon, 19 Jul 2004 10:02:29 -0700

Voice over IP, a field I've been working in, has been generating some recent excitement. And that's appropriate.

However a lot of the talk is about something I consider the wrong direction. I call it PoIP, for PSTN over IP or worse, POTS over IP. (POTS, in turn, stands for Plain old Telephone Service.)

This is largely what you get from Vonage and AT&T CallVantage and similar companies. An effort to create a product very similar to the old style phone or PBX, just at a lower price. Yes, there are some differences -- a few cute features formely found only in higher end PBXs and so-called Intelligent switches, and of course the geography-independent nature of using your internet connection as the hookup.

But must of these new features are evolutionary. They aren't the "disruptive" change that we're really looking for. Indeed, in the early days, I used to joke that VoIP was "Not quite as good as the old telephone, but at least it's harder to configure."

It may be that reputation that scared people into making PoIP. They feel, perhaps correctly, that first they must convince the public that VoIP isn't scary, that it's very similar to the phone. And indeed, some customers need that convincing. But that train of thought never leads to a disruptive change, and Vonage will never survive being AT&T for a few bucks less.

Skype, for better or worse, was ready to give up the old world, and insist you use a PC to make calls. I've had investors insist there is no way people would pick up a mouse to make calls, but they are doing so.

A disruptive product is worse than the status quo in others, and does something new the old guard weren't expecting. VoIP users should embrace the internet, not just to jam it into the phone.