If Only $500 Could Make You a Millionaire

Patrick Benard of TMCNet has an excellent piece today on the emergence of pyramid or Multi-Level Marketing (MLM) schemes within the VoIP industry. The premise is simple – you pay an upfront fee to get into the program and receive basic training. Next you go out an recruit others to become agents underneath you. Do you or anyone else you have recruited every really sell VoIP service? Who knows. But who cares, you going to be rich right?

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All of the Factors are Here…

VoIP Supply colleague Cory Andrews pointed me to a posting by Andy Abramson, on the “untapped business VoIP market”. I could not agree more with Andy’s findings, based on this ZDNet Report, that 2007 and 2008 will be the year Business VoIP explodes. Since 2004, we have seen heavy growth in the residential VoIP, and to a certain degree the hosted VoIP sectors, mainly fueled by aggressive marketing by VoIP service providers chasing early adopters. Over the past six months though, the amount of inbound inquires from networking integrators, VAR, consultants, and vendors about business VoIP, has increased ten fold, further asserting the “interest” in the technology has finally caught up with the “implementation” aspect of the technology.

Provided that hardware vendors continue to develop easy-to-use and easy-to-implement solutions, coupled with reliable, high quality voice from service providers, there is no doubt that inthe next 12 -18 months we will see a mass migration to VoIP from businesses across the globe.

Cable VoIP Subscribers Nearly Doubled in 2006

Russell Shaw points us to an In-Stat study that shows cable providers nearly doubled the number of telephone subscribers. I for one, do not see this trend slowing anytime soon. According to the study, of the 9.4 million cable telphone subscribers in North America, 6.6 million are VoIP, that is an alarmingly high adoption rate, especially if you’re a residential VoIP pure play offering service through VoIP adapters.

According to Mike Paxon, In-Stat analyst, “In a growing number of markets around the world, cable TV operators consider telephony service to be an integral part of their telecommunications service bundle.” That means the triple and quadruple “plays” will continue to be heavily pushed and marketed to an existing customer base, and potential customers. With a “communications monopoly” the cable providers will be able to offer outstanding pricing, and the convenience of billing consolidation, which could spell big trouble for pure play VoIP providers, who other than offering an even lower price (and smaller margins for themselves) will barely have a leg to stand on.

Could the rest of 2007, and 2008, be the period that cable kills the pure play residential VoIP provider?

Skype Looking For Beta-testers For Their Enterprise Offering

Skype announced yesterday that they are looking for companies with a 1,000 or more employees to test an enterprise class version of Skype. According to the release, Skype Enterpirse Edition has all of the standard Skype features, in addition to:

• Enterprise Network Compatibility
• Company-owned Skype Name Creation
• Customisable to Corporate Requirements
• Direct Skype Technical Support
• Maintenance

Although this sounds like an excellent proposition, I wonder about the load that using Skype will take on an enterprise level data network, especially one that, presumably, was built to only handle PC related traffic. While it seems that Skype *may* have built some sort of technology into the enterprise client to alleviate this concern via their “enterprise network compatibility”, I know of 50-100 person companies that use Skype, who struggle with issues related to to voice/video calling on their PC data network.

If the load can not be adequetely handled by the enterprise network, it is fairly certain that latency, jitter, and packet loss will occur resulting in a less than favorable calling experience, and more than likely poor results from the Skype for enterprise program.