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Predicting POTS Path: Part One
Virtual Office Featured Article
April 29, 2013
Predicting POTS Path: Part One

By TMCnet Special Guest
Stuart Zipper, Blogger for Phone.com and an independent hi-tech journalist, contributor and former editor of several tech publications


In my daily wanderings around the Internet I read a little opinion piece by a young journalist in which he predicted that “plain old telephone service,” or POTS for short, isn’t going to go away any time soon. POTS is, of course, the old switched phone network which VoIP service is rapidly replacing for both business and residential use.


Intrigued by the headline, I read on, and soon discovered that the guy was basing his theory in part on the fact that he had been using a cell phone as his only means of communications. For him POTS was a new discovery! He went on to rave about its stability and security in comparison to wireless communications.

VoIP did get a mention … but just barely.

Despite the widespread estimates of just how seriously VoIP services will impact the revenues of traditional landline, and even wireless providers. Research house Ovum (News - Alert) (News - Alert), for instance, last year predicted that VoIP will cost the traditional telcos $479 billion in revenue by 2020. That represents 6.9 percent of the voice market, which isn’t bad for a brand new technology battling to take over from a century old embedded technology. Now Ovum doesn’t expect traditional landlines to simply disappear, but it expects landline revenues to slide by a compound 2.4 percent per year going to 2020.

Those numbers, though, don’t even begin to address the hidden penetration level of VoIP, as it displaces traditional telephony. For instance, “the reality is that most incumbents now use wholesale VoIP to carry international traffic over backbone networks,” wrote the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) in an article entitled “Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) comes of age.” And I note that article is from a couple of years ago. One assumes that VoIP displacement of other technologies in international backbones has continued in concert with the increase in VoIP landline penetration.

Indeed the bottom line, for both domestic and international telephony, is that VoIP will totally displace POTS. Its impact on the telecommunications industry is simply that it will BE the telecommunications industry. “low costs, and the efficiencies for carriers of maintaining a single, unified telecommunications network, guarantee that all telephony will eventually be done over IP. Essentially everyone in the telecommunications industry agrees on that,” predicted an article in the IEEE Spectrum – to some the bible of high technology – as far back as 2005.

The U.S. Army, as I’ve recently written, is busily switching over to VoIP. Indeed, gone are the days that any high school hacker could listen in on their neighbor’s VoIP conversations if they were both on the same cable television broadband loop. The new rival technologies used by traditional cable and phone companies are, for the record, secure. At least the U.S. Army thinks so, and who am I to argue with the U.S. Army?

And of course if the security is good enough for the government, I dare say it’s more than good enough for small business VoIP users. For enterprise VoIP users too.

Also getting short shrift is a discussion of the fact that, for the large majority of small office – home office (SOHO), small business, and residential VoIP users the infrastructure to deliver the broadband for VoIP is the precise same infrastructure used to deliver POTS (or, in the case of cable subscribers, the same as used to deliver video service). We’re told that, because the technology used to deliver that broadband is evolving, VoIP isn’t a clear choice.

Now wait a minute. Let’s remember the old mechanical switches that were the backbone of the POTS network. I was actually present when the first computer-based phone switch was unveiled. POTS technology evolved constantly (anyone remember Millie the operator and the old plug boards?) and nobody questioned that, so why question VoIP just because broadband technology is evolving?To read more about the Zipper's prediction of the POTS' path next week, stayed tuned to TMCnet's Virutal Office channel.




Edited by Ashley Caputo


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