Will VoIP service ever be free?

From Bandipedia

There is healthy debate in the industry today as to the future of voice services. With companies such as Google and Skype offering free subscriber to subscriber calling, it is not out of the realm of possibility to think that there is a day approaching rapidly when base voice services (local and perhaps even long distance service) will be either free or very inexpensive for both residential and business customers.

What does this mean for the customer?

The customer will benefit from the tremendous competition for business in the VoIP space in a number of ways:

  • Reduced costs for traditional voice services - This is an obvious and intrisic benefit to increased competition
  • More and better services - VoIP providers will be forced to innovate ahead of customer demand, and to provide more and better add-on services for which they can charge the customer. Things like integrated Instant Messenger (IM) appearance, integrations with 3rd party applications to provide screen pops, click to dial, and other functions will be critical to a VoIP provider keeping their customer satisfied.

What does this mean for VoIP providers?

Because of the ever-decreasing margins for providing basic voice services (dial tone), VoIP providers must be actively pursuing new and innovative ways to add value to their VoIP offering. Providing traditional phone services will simply not be good enough. VoIP providers must invest heavily in research and development to determine what services customers are willing to pay for as add-ons to the traditional services. Without a steady stream of new applications that meet the needs of the customer, VoIP providers will not survive.

The view over the horizon for voice services is one of exciting new applications and services at steadily decreasing costs to the customer. The traditional PBX is approaching extinction as these applications become easier to provide for the VoIP provider, and cheaper to purchase for the end customer.

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