I am working in VoIP for past 7 years (approximately 7). I always wonder what a beautiful field it is. Indeed enchanting. New features new concepts and what not.
But what makes me think even harder is that why would companies fail if VoIP is so great.
A simple answer perhaps is that products folks have not thought through it. In regular telephony, every feature costs you something. When you ask for caller Id, you got to pay a few extra dollars over your regular service charges. This model is perfect. This allows new features to come up and to get rewarded.
VoIP also started with great deal of new features. But along came services like Vonage. Which simply gave all features for $25. And thats where the demise started. Not having a mechanism to bill a customer for different services may have prompted such a step, I guess. But that simply lowered the bar. And any further competitor who has similar service, in order to compete, kept further lowering the bar, instead of increasing rate for new features.
As a result margins became razor thin for a service which is great. But since margins are thin, service quality started getting lower too. Finally causing people to think that its just not worth it.
Time is not gone yet. Even now, one can turn the tide, get bolder, and state that, "features will cost you money Mr Customer". That will bring up the VoIP economy and make it a better technology.
If not done so, it is quiet possible that, this great technology will not help its inventors and developers make a dime.
Jack Dosel
