VoIP technology is a fairly new technology in the public and business domain. It has been around for around 10 years, however in the time around the end of 2000 is was predominantly used by fairly computer savvy people using private communications servers such as Teamspeak and not as a means of replacing existing telecommunications.
From humble beginnings however, now most business phone systems installed today are VoIP systems or
hosted VoIP systems. On top of this increasingly VoIP is reaching into the public sectors. Popular programs such as Skype have brought the ability to use VoIP to every household with an internet connection and it is used by thousands of people every day to reduce calling costs, increase convenience and increase productivity.
But where is VoIP headed in the coming future? In the short term it is likely we will see VoIP continue to grow into the telephony world and replace old POTS (plain old telephone service) systems for businesses. As the infrastructure for communications moved away from old connections and towards fibre optics, there’s a good chance that home users will see
VoIP solutions start to move into the home and replace normal telephone services.
The issues faced by this however are largely with the emergency services; due to the non location specific nature of VoIP calls, it can be hard to locate the call in certain circumstances. In America now, it has been made law to implement VoIP enhanced 911 for any VoIP systems being used to replace a POTS. VoIP enhanced 911 associates a physical address with the calling number making it possible to trace calls and provide a quick response time.
VoIP is already even being used in the mobile world, with many smartphones using or having VoIP applications available for use. These typically need to use a wifi connection to operate with a good quality of service since 3G can be too slow but already there are a huge number of public wifi networks available for mobile users. With increases to mobile technology happening all the time however, we may see a move from the current mobile contracts to a data.
Of course with these increases in the number of people with internet access in more places across the world on their mobile devices, there really aren’t many places that VoIP can’t go, so really when asked the question; “where is VoIP headed?” well, the answer has to be; everywhere!
