VoIP technology; evolution vs. innovation

There’s a big debate going on about VoIP phone systems, not whether the technology can save you lots of money, provide lots of extra features and increase the productivity of your company, because we know it can do all of those thing, but whether VoIP technology was innovative thinking which revolutionised the communications industry, or just the logical next step in the evolution of communications.

The quick answer of course is a bit of both, but lets have a look at some of the parts which have been evolution and which have been innovation.

VoIP started out its existence in 1994 when it was invented by Alon Cohen and Lior Haramaty and through their company VocalTec released the first commercial VoIP software in 1995. At this point however VoIP tended to be unreliable since the internet lacked the speed required to maintain clear vocals. In my opinion, this move, which went on to create its own market and redefine another one was a major innovation, the technology was already in existence however, so VoIP was just another way of using what was already in place. In this sense, it’s more evolutionary of the internet and telephone systems. In my opinion, I would say this was more evolution than innovation because it wouldn’t have been long before another company took advantage of the technology around them. (Though that’s easier to say in hindsight).

The problems of VoIP and the lack of the internet speed and reliability to maintain high call quality still followed VoIP into the early 21st century and to an extent, up to the modern day. Two innovations which helped this have been the packet priority for VoIP traffic and delay sensitive marking of packets. Packet priority is a great way of helping a VoIP connection, specifically when VoIP is used on a internet connection with other data traffic (such as web browsing and file transfers) by giving all of the VoIP data packets a higher priority so they get transferred first. Combining this with packet marking helps to reconstruct the voice data on the other end instead of transmitting it as and when it comes. This greatly helps to reduce the effects of latency on a phone call and can make the audio much clearer. These again I think are evolutionary developments to the technology since they’re fairly simple (though effective) solutions to evident problems.

Then there are the features offered by VoIP services, while it is true that hosted VoIP tends to offer features such as conference calling cheaper, these are all features which were previously available with larger PBX systems, so again simply an evolution of past telephone technology.

So overall, while the development of VoIP has been paved with innovation at every step in its way. I believe the technology as a whole was simply an evolution of pre-existing technology, though to give it its due, growing up in the shadow of two innovations as massive as the telephone and the internet is a daunting task and VoIP to date has certainly shown it is the worthy descendant of these technologies.