Virtual Office Resource

Perhaps the most widely discussed technology today is voice over Internet protocol (VoIP). Using the Internet to make phone calls allows businesses to slash telecom costs and collaborate more easily; as such, the technology has been widely adopted over the past several years.

Although IP telephony only recently began to take off on a large scale, the technology itself has actually been around for 20 years—since Alon Cohen helped invent it in his days working for VocalTec. For his part, Cohen, now an Executive Vice President and CTO at Phone.com (News - Alert), didn’t think it would take the better part of two decades for VoIP to make the kind of impact it is making today.

“To be honest, I didn’t think it would take this long. I thought it would be five or maybe 10 years at the most. But with two economic downturns and the dotcom bust, it took a little longer than I expected,” Cohen told TMC (News - Alert) during Editor’s Day on Tuesday, Jan. 27 at ITEXPO Miami. “It was clear to me that this was a winning technology. But it wasn’t clear to a lot of others in the tech industry, because a lot of veterans in the industry didn’t even believe in the Internet in the early days.”

Cohen moved to Phone.com seven years ago when he realized that most of the early technological difficulties with VoIP had disappeared. Bandwidth (News - Alert) and endpoints were no longer a problem, and neither was connectivity to PTSN. So Cohen recognized that the new and exciting challenge in IP-telephony was finding new ways to bring value to users.

“One of the things that is fundamentally different from with VoIP as opposed to standard telephony is the ability for VoIP to improve by leaps and bounds,” he explained. “Now it’s about the features and the service you get. So we’re not thinking about the basic technology anymore, but about how smart we can make the features.”

Cohen has been coming to ITEXPO (News - Alert) for many years, but the 2015 Miami iteration is special, as he participated in a special panel session called “The “20 Years of VoIP” on the morning of Wednesday, January 28^th along with other pioneers in the field.  

While he appreciates when peers acknowledge his role in creating VoIP, Cohen was quick to note that ITEXPO is always full of innovators that have made their own contributions to the technology industry. He gets more enjoyment out of working to improve contemporary communications systems and from witnessing how VoIP is actually being used.

“From an inventor’s perspective, it’s just exciting to see people using it and getting the benefits” he explained. “In the old days, when you would call a PSTN and ask for a number to be forwarded to another number, it would take three days. Now it takes 30 seconds.”