Matt Asay, member of the CNet Blog Network and OSS technology pundit, weighs in on VoIP.
Voice-over-IP (VOIP) has long promised to significantly disrupt the telecommunications market. And so it has. Never before have so many people paid so little for technology that doesn’t work.
Yes, I know. You probably have a VOIP provider that works. All the time. Guess what? I don’t believe you. I’ve used Skype, Comcast Digital Voice, Vonage, a commercial service my company uses, and it’s all rubbish.
The problems vary, but one thing is clear: Plain old telephone service (POTS) may be pricey, but at least it works. All the time. It’s amazing how much pain we’ll endure to save a few pennies. I’m switching back to POTS.
Back in 2006, Asay praised Matrix Partners’ $13.8 Million dollar investment in Digium, a prominent player in the VoIP space.
As recently as July 4th, 2007 Asay trumpeted the business benefits of VoIP and declared Skype: The Ultimate Collaboration Tool
From Asay’s July 4th, 2008 CNet post regarding his firm’s positive experiences with Skype:
Being a company with employees spread across the United States and Europe, Alfresco has long used Skype to cut phone costs and as our common instant messaging platform. But with a recent update from Skype, “public chats” have been enabled, giving us one more tool.
Fact: Not much decentralized group collaboration, cost savings or “public chats” happening on POTS Matt…
More from Asay’s July 4th, 2008 CNet post regarding Skype usage:
We now have group chats for the management team, for the solutions engineering team, for support, and so on. Often these chats will rest silent, but when a good conversation gets moving, it’s invaluable to team cohesion and productivity.
Equally confusing, the mercurial Asay stated in September of 2007:
Today I’m eating crow, and it tastes great. Why? Because Vonage has been complete rubbish for me, whereas Skype is increasingly approaching perfection. I dropped my traditional phone service for Vonage. I’m now about to drop my traditionally awful Vonage for Skype.
Odd how one can go from Skype fanboy to declaring the technology “rubbish” in the space of 13 days.
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Cory, it seems that Matt is a flip-flopper. An industry outsider who merely writes based on the trends of the day...which are set by those who actually know what is going on (the primary reason I do not read sites like CNET).
I suspect that last weeks slew of posts (one of which I wrote) about the less than impressive subscriber numbers from the more well known business VoIP numbers reported.
I don't think VoIP is rubbish (obviously), but I do think that it is definitely not growing and progressing as quickly as many would like. At the end of the day, we have probably hit a temporary plateau...as new customer types take a look at the technology, most have had to been a little slow to respond to the changing demands.
Cory, Matt is just getting negative attention stunt for getting more traffic on his blog. Any upcoming technology is always on its development stage...everyday, every minute.
I request just to ignore this kind of NAY SAYERS....
Although there is some truth to voip sometimes being rubbish, depending on many factors, I'm surprised this common mistake of talking about saving money enters into it.
VoIP is *not* about saving money - it least it hasn't been for me since Dialpad (aka "sir, you're breaking up") and FWD (aka "is FWD down?").
This said, a few of us who love VoIP for what it really brings to the mix in small business, including Dan York, Michael Graves and myself have all posted about how we retain POTS lines :) I need at least one per location for DSL anyway, so why not have a copper pair number for emergencies, including power outage?
For readers that may not be as familiar with the many ways to deploy VoIP, it's important to point out that Matt's comments are criticisms of voice over the internet -- not VoIP in general.
If the underlying IP network is unreliable, then packetized voice calls will be unreliable. For some, the internet is an acceptable transport for voice. But there's no guarantee of reliability across internet networks.
There are many customers that enjoy the benefits of voice-data convergence on their LAN, but use dedicated circuits (T1 or POTS) to connect their business to the outside world. It's easy to guarantee VoIP performance when you own the LAN infrastructure -- no so on the hit-or-miss internet.
Rod Montgomery
Director of Services, Digium, Inc.
@Roderickm
Great point, one that is vastly misunderstood by most customers.