According to a study conducted by Spirent Communications, Americans are more worried that service quality over government regulation will hold back the adoption of VoIP-based telephony. International customers and industry leaders, however, see government red tape as a stronger threat for VoIP communications to evolve at a rapid speed.

Rockville, MD-based Spirent Communications, along with the International Engineering Consortium found that a staggering 85 percent of voters think that the VoIP revolution has begun. Furthermore, 84 percent of respondents believe that VoIP is ready for widespread deployment. Companies surveyed included: Telecom Italia, Siemens, BT, Cisco, Telefonica, and Alcatel.

Despite Americans trusting that VoIP is indeed a technology that is quickly catching on, they mostly fear poor quality to threaten the nationwide adoption of Internet telephony. In contrast, the study concluded that more than 20 percent of leading telecom players across Europe have singled out government regulation as the most significant threat to the successful deployment of VoIP.

Rob Chambers, publisher of Total Telecom magazine said: "VoIP access at home is more available internationally than in North America - with 55 percent of respondents in the former category having VoIP access at home, compared with 45 percent in the US. Overall, the poll results are aligned with what we have been hearing in the industry, namely service providers intend to make IP networks and services the technology of their future."

Survey participants were also asked to rate which service providers will be successful at deploying VoIP. BT ranked high on all three polls, capturing 16 percent of the votes obtained at an international event called Broadband World Forum. The remaining votes were fairly evenly divided between five carriers: Fast Web, Telecom Italia, France Telecom, Skype, and Tiscali. Each carrier garnered between 7 percent and 12 percent of the votes.

Spirent Communications

www.spirentcom.com 

Johanne Torres is contributing editor for TMCnet.com and Internet Telephony magazine. Previously, she was assistant editor for EContent magazine in Connecticut. She can be reached by e-mail at [email protected]