Cord-cutting isn’t just for subscription cable TV customers. As broadband Internet becomes cheaper and more ubiquitous, an increasing number of businesses are ditching conventional landlines in favor of Voice over IP (VoIP) services.
VoIP technology has long been a tempting proposition for businesses, mostly because it been touted as a way to make telephony significantly cheaper than placing your calls through traditional telephone service providers.
Poised for global growth
According to a recent Transparency Market Research (TMR) report, the global VoIP services market is projected to be worth US$136.76 billion by 2020. Part of this growth comes from increased adoption by small and home offices (SOHO), but several emerging trends are also converging to push the VoIP market forward.
VoIP is a foundation for the adoption of other modern, digital communications services such as video, file sharing and other collaboration platforms. The IP infrastructure organisations deploy, powers corporate information services and enables the cloud-based collaboration, such as online video conference and internet calling that have become standard business tools.
The rapidly growing adoption of smart portable devices such as smartphones and tablets in the residential and corporate sectors is also one of the main drivers of the global VoIP services market.
Other influential trends shaping the global VoIP services market include: VoIP over cloud, growth of mobile VoIP, migration from fixed line voice to IP-based wireless VoIP service, and free group video calling The global VoIP services market is also benefitting from the emergence of new mobile VoIP services based on improved wireless networks.
Promise and challenges
The implications of these industry trends are significant for businesses. However, as with any technology, reality is somewhat different from the hype. Depending on who you ask, the voice over IP (VoIP) services market is either giving ground to mobile or growing more profitable than ever. In reality, both are true.
In general, the rapid rise of mobile devices is coming at the expense of ever-shrinking landlines. The implication of this trend on the VoIP market is that some businesses are electing to go completely mobile. However, the most progressive VoIP providers are actually evolving to meet the opportunities of the mobile revolution.
The VoIP companies releasing new features around mobility, cloud and wireless connectivity are the ones growing and gaining customers. But market success is by no means guaranteed.
In emerging economies, certain regulations or government policies to protect or safeguard the interests of traditional telecom service providers is hampering growth of the VOIP services market. However, with need to make affordable international or long-distance calls growing constantly, the impact of such artificial constraints, however, is expected to decline over time.
Value for business
Still, migrating from standard telephony to VoIP can be very beneficial to business. The technology is now mature enough to replace legacy telephony. Depending on the size of your organisation, the infrastructure you already have in place, and the specific business use-case you envision, taking the VoIP plunge could cost your company almost nothing, or it could require significant up-front costs and resources.
The new normal for businesses is communications over multiple devices like smartphones, tablets and laptops; and on multiple platforms such as instant messaging and video streaming.
Today’s enterprises are discovering that their employees want a choice of communication devices similar to the options they increasingly enjoy out of the office. There are also realising that fundamental business benefits like reduced cost and improved employee productivity come standard with an effective VoIP deployment.
At the end of the day, that’s the real reason for businesses to make the switch to VoIP. The real potential of VoIP is not the technology, its business value.
5 key VoIP considerations for your business
1. Smart mobility
VoIP services give businesses a dedicated base of communications but that doesn’t necessarily mean your employees are physically in the office.
More and more VoIP providers offer real-time call forwarding from the office system to telecommuters’ phone lines or designated mobile devices over 3G and 4G networks, rather than traditional signals like Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM).
2. Bring your own device (BYOD)
To enable mobility, VoIP services must embrace BYOD policies to securely integrate employees’ devices into the system, be it through a smartphone, tablet app or an automated business caller ID assigned to each device.
The Transparency Market Research analysis shows a growing trend of BYOD increasing demand for mobile VoIP on smart devices, and projects a 16.6 per cent growth in phone-to-phone VoIP subscribers by 2020.
3. Hosted VoIP
A cloud-hosted VoIP option is a great way for a business to save money over building on-premises VoIP infrastructure. Hosted VoIP solutions generally cost less upfront, with far less setup cost, so small- to mid-size businesses (SMBs), especially those who don’t need a dedicated on-premises infrastructure, should look for a software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering when weighing VoIP options.
4. Wireless collaboration
The Transparency Market Research report highlights is that providers are migrating from fixed-line voice (IP-PBX) to IP-based, wireless VoIP service. This opens a variety of new collaboration possibilities and businesses should identify the VoIP services that are taking advantage of them. Tablets and smartphones should be able to wirelessly connect into the main VoIP network and many services now offer group video calling or Web conferencing as a free add-on or built-in feature.
5. Usage quality remains essential
A VoIP solution may boast the shiniest responsive interface and a wide array of mobility and wireless capabilities, but the VoIP calls still need to do the basics right: have reliable hardware, crisp call quality, and fundamental features such as integrated dial-in conferencing and speech-to-text recording transcription.
Newer online VoIP services should seamlessly work with the provider’s existing hardware solutions, and it’s crucial to test the service across different Internet connection speeds and bandwidths to check for any degradation in audio quality, lack of dial tones, or excess echo.
Source: PC Magazine
Bevil Wooding is a founding member of the Caribbean Network Operators Group, CaribNOG (www.caribnog.org), a volunteer-based group of Caribbean IT professionals, security specialists and network administrators. He is also an internet strategist with Packet Clearing House (www.pch.net) an international research and capacity building non-profit organisation. Follow on Twitter: @bevilwooding