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.

Where will VoIP Technology Go in the Future?

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!