John Linton VoIP customers for Exetel continue to rapidly increase for as I have no doubt they do for every other ISP who provides either their own or a re-sold VoIP service. I was reviewing what Exetel needed to do last night in terms of improving its VoIP service, not in terms of quality which I can never tell the difference between toll and VoIP via Exetel, but in terms of removing the remaining barriers to a 100% take up by our broadband customers. Of course there will be the never ending 'price pressures' but the two main issues, for us, are PSTN number portability and equipment cost and ease of set up and operation.
In 'rummaging' through my memories of my personal involvement with VOIP and 'compression' I can still remember the first demonstration of voice telephony over a standard PSTN telephone line that had been 'boosted' to 2 mbps x 2mbps in Chicago in 1993 with the voice signals (4 concurrent conversations) sharing the same infrastructure as data. It worked very well and within two years similar 'boxes' were becoming avaialble in Australia via an enterprising technology importer. I can remember selling voice services over VPNs between a company's various offices in early 1996 very successfully then using the 'huge' bandwidth of 64 kbps and 120 kbps ISDN services.
The quality of the service, mostly, was very good to excellent and the savings, in those days of Telstra/Optus only charges for inter-State calls, paid for the whole VPN ignoring any benefit from the data services component of the solution. Over the next few years the technology continued to improve and the cost of the 'boxes' required to make it work continued to fall until it was no longer some sort of technology 'magic' only affordable by large companies with lots of IT skills and IT budgets to match but was an increasingly common implementation across a wide range of commercial and government organisations.
I think the various VoIP equipment providers have been saying that "This year will be the breakthrough year when VoIP will really take off" since 1995. I've heard those statements every year of my working life since that time - but not recently - but I can't remember just when I stopped hearing that statement. The reason is, of course, that VoIP has become the voice system of choice by almost every commercial organistion over the past 2 - 3 years and no decision maker who gives it even cursory thought would use 'standard' voice services. This is't just a 'price consideration' it's because VoIP offers features and flexibilities at very low hardware prices that not even the most expensive of 'standard' PABXs can provide.
Today, of course, VoIP is also very commonly used by an increasing percentage of broad band users and, in Exetel's case, it's not uncommon for 40% of our daily broadband activations to also choose to use Exetel for their VoIP service (and as I don't believe Exetel customers are likely to only use Exetel's VoIP service that woud indicate that probably over 60% of broadband users who buy from smaller ISPs such as Exetel are now using VoIP ), as opposed to those people who chose to buy from Telstra/Optus/AAPT who remain wedded to the wire line rip off money.
So as I was attempting to work out how we could raise our VOIP user ratio to 100% of our broadband users the two major 'barriers' narrowed down to people wanting to transfer their current PSTN number to their VoIP servce and reducing the cost of the "ATA" or whatever preferred VoIP connectivity device to a point where neither issue was a barrier. I have always understood that transferring a PSTN number to VoIP was possible but the processes were 'clunky', took time and were a support burden and also there was no, 'clunky' or not, process to transfer that number from VoIP back to PSTN. Other ISPs have solved those problems (or costed in the costs of the 'clunkiness') and Exetel will try and overcome the current difficulties in the not too distant future - so that particular 'barrier' will disappear.
The cost of the 'ATA' remains an issue as Exetel isn't in a position to give the device away for 'free' a la Telstra, Optus etc on a "24 month contract" or some other contrivance. Fortunately VoIP chipsets and connectors are increasingly being built in to broad band modems so the second issue will also disappear over time. Naked ADSL has significantly increased the 'general' use of VoIP and, subject to it being technically feasible, I would think the take up of HSPA will further increase that take up.
So my conclusion was that I could see that over 80% of all Exetel users would be using VoIP by mid 2009 and perhaps as high as 60% would be using Exetel's VOIP - even if we did nothing more than make the 'porting' of the PSTN number available. Pretty good result for effectively doing nothing. I didn't make much progress beyond that point in finding a way of increasing that theoretical percentage from 60% to close to 100% - not being in a position to give anything away to accomplish such a result.
It's actually nice to see that VoIP has become as universally used as the die hard pioneers always said it was going to be - they, eventually, have been proven correct and all their reasoning was correct.