VoIP on the Brain

VOICE OVER IP is everywhere, most especially on the minds of the guys at news.com. Why they summarily crowned Cisco as a VoIP "pioneer" over here, making a silly little box with an RJ-11 in it should be trivial. If that wasn't enough, you throw in the spin about the Kazaa getting into VoIP here had an interview with Vinton Cerf whereby he declares MCI will move up to 25% of their phone calls onto VoIP this year and 100% by 2005. here, Vinton said MCI isn't building new infrastructure, just adopting current IP infrastructure. I suspect it's a matter of taking MCI's excess IP capacity overbuilt and over-merged in the dot.com boom and putting it to use. (We'll be getting back to Cerf in a minute...)

Let's not forget the arrival of mad genius Michael Robinson into the VoIP realm as he sells SIP phones to the masses. I've always admired Michael, since he seems to be one part innovation, several parts consumer marketing and one part pick-a-fight wild-ass. He cashed in on MP3.Com even as he lost a court fight with the record companies, is currently battling Microsoft over the generic-ness of "Lindows", and will likely try to stir up the phone companies with SIPphone, (www.sipphone.com). I expect to see Michael winging his way to Washington D.C. and declare that VoIP shouldn't be regulated before the Congress, the FCC, and whomever else he can get a good sound byte from.

All these new guys make Jeff Pulver of pulver.com look like The Elder Statesman as he entertains the VoIP world at his Voice on the Net conference http://pulver.com/von/ in Boston this week. (Due disclaimer - I do some writing for Jeff and he could make plenty of money teaching marketing wanna-bes how to throw a good party). Jeff's been doing VoIP since.... I can't even remember. At least since '97, as early as '96 or '95.

In the news.com interview when referring to MCI's flat-rate phone service, Cerf said, "So we're pricing per pipe instead of pricing per packet. A voice service that's operated through this kind of [IP] network could legitimately be priced on this basis..." This is a far cry from the siren call dating back to the mid-90s when AT&T/MCI/Sprint were running around saying that charging by the packet was what people (i.e. the people who wanted a bigger profit margin) wanted. Instead, VoIP will ultimately end up pushing all phone companies into flat-rate pricing (at least in the States). Flat-rate pricing is already a given with some cell phone plans.