VoIP As The Trojan Horse For Broadband?
from the sneaking-it-in-the-door... dept
While many telcos are somewhat dreading how VoIP will cut into their cash cow voice revenue, some are suggesting telcos need to take a radically different view of VoIP. The key ingredient, though, is realizing they’re not telcos, but broadband providers (something Verizon has said — but it’s not clear if they fully realize this yet). Then, VoIP can act as a trojan horse for broadband. The thinking is that nearly all of telco customers have voice service, but a small percentage get broadband from them (if they get it from anyone). However, if telcos offered to swap out regular phone service for VoIP without the corresponding internet service, they would also have the data service ready to go if the customer ever wanted it. That is, it’s easier to convince people just to switch from a traditional phone line to VoIP (especially since its cheaper) than to convince them to sign up for broadband and VoIP. Basically, they’d be offering a broadband offering that isn’t an internet service — just for VoIP. However, everything would be set up for internet and other services, so if a user wanted to switch on the ISP side, they could do so with a single request, rather than any installation work. It’s certainly an interesting approach, but it’s not likely that the telcos will move in this direction any time soon.
Comments on “VoIP As The Trojan Horse For Broadband?”
And in case of emergency?
A VoIP line disappears in a power failure, and in far too many cases, cell phone towers don’t have their own generators. Landlines persist because people want an emergency line in case of a power failure. Moving people over to VoIP takes that landline away.
If the telcos want to approach communications with the method you described, Mike, they will need to find a way to make the phone line remain live for people who want that functionality.
Re: And in case of emergency?
Sorry that doesnt always fly either. Out here in my somewhat remote locale when power goes out so does power to the local RT(remote terminal) that houses our phone connections. During the last major outage Bell South brought out a propane powered generator to the RT just to keep phone service alive.
Re: And in case of emergency?
More and more Router/VoIP hardware vendors are starting to look at putting a battery inside the VoIP box/router to resolve that problem.
However the easist solution, given that current VoIP user and even some cordless phone users are aware of that limitation, would be to buy a small UPS and plug those devices into it to solve both power failures and power surges.
Re: And in case of emergency?
As others have noted, the power failure issue is really a red herring. If you ask many people who say this what kind of phone they have, they’ll admit they have a cordless phone, which doesn’t work when the power goes out anyway.
Besides, it’s likely that (as others mentioned) there will be solutions for the power issue before too long.
Re: Re: UPS in the box perhaps ?
Yeah I want a UPS for my phone too … as if I don’t have enough of this junk b/c manufactures don’t install these safeguards in the first place.
It’s like buying a car & being told: ” Well if you really want to make sure you don’t crash, you might want to install brakes. “
Why hasn’t anyone just built a UPS right into the box ?
Re: And in case of emergency?
Back when I was looking at ISDN as a possible upgrade from dialup service, most ISDN customer-premises-equipment boxes had hefty batteries for exactly this reason. Emergency planning still kind of assumes that utility power and telephone service are partly independent.
Most VoIP planning has zero support for emergencies. Hell, most of it can’t even handle unusually heavy non-emergency load.