Is VoIP commercially viable today?  The answer is technically yes and technically no.  VoIP does work.  There are regulatory, business, and implementation issues related to VoIP that need to be addressed.  However, if past experience means anything all of these issues will be addressed simultaneously while VoIP is being aggressively sold.

As I had indicated the focus on voice as opposed to other data services is simple to understand.  Voice is the application that appeals to the mass market.  The revenue generated by the mass market is what is needed to get IP deployed.  By itself, IP has enormous benefits.  However, to the mass market the benefits of IP all boil down to a single idea; meeting the lowest common denominator for service needs and that common denominator is voice.  IP networks have been around for years but until voice became a viable commercial service the investment community treated IP as a high-end technology meant for the lab.  In fact until the market environment changed enough to warrant investors to spend money on deploying IP, VoIP was considered just voice over a packet data network.Until the revenue opportunities all but disappeared because of the “dot-bomb” explosion, the investment community ignored IP.  Without any new opportunities VoIP and IP suddenly became popular in 2003.  To understand VoIP we need to understand IP.

In general there are business and technical benefits to deploying an IP network. 

The business benefits are:

Reduced long distance costs

Lower network costs

More enhanced services – Voice over IP is just one of the services

The technical benefits are:

Less bandwidth for more calls

More efficient use of network resources

Distributed network intelligence