This is particularly advantageous for facilities and traditional circuit-switched telecom managers because it can eliminate the costs of moves, adds and changes (MAC). Also, instead of enterprises fielding two separate, disparate teams (network and voice), re-trained network admins can now handle the phone system as well. And this equals cost savings while simultaneously increasing the number and, hopefully, quality of communications services for employees.
While it may seem VoIP is only one small service among an ever-increasing number of services telcos will soon be fielding, it also is the linch-pin offering that signals the reinvention of the industry as providers of much more than just voice communications.
“It (IP) allows us to be more efficient in the way we manage the customer’s network,” said Tom Roche, Verizon’s director of Advanced Products and Services. “It also provides us the platform to manage much more than just (customers’) voice or just their data network. I now have a platform in place I can provide multiple services and start adding additional layers of applications like security or a redundant capacity, a storage capacity … I now can start to capture some that business that I’ve never been able to do for that customer in the past.”
Given all these factors — a tested technology that finally works, significant market opportunity with interested and buying clients, a new wave of revenue-generating services for the telcos, and the potential cost savings that come from a simplification of the entire communications network for both sides, and it seems apparent that VoIP is the future for telcos and, therefore, the rest of us.
“Absolutely,” said Verizon’s Roche.