"Voice over IP" and "VoIP" and all the other terms created over a decade ago to talk about how voice is transmitted over an IP network are, frankly, outdated.  We don't say "Video over IP" or "Text over IP" to refer to the medium of transmission, we simply say "video" or "fax" and then clarify it later.   All voice will be IP in the future and there's a lot more IP touching voice on analog. 

VoIP has become almost as meaningless as term as Unified Communications (News - Alert) (UC).  With apologies to the UC people,  the marketing departments of the telecom world destroyed Unified Communications into a generic term that requires detailed clarification by vendor and customer before any intelligent conversation can take place.

Back in the dark ages of VoIP, there were a number acronyms to describe voice over various technologies. We had VoBB  (Voice over Broadband) and VoDSL (Voice over DSL), followed by VOPC (Voice over Packet Cable).  Soft clients got their own category of over-the-top (OTT) services.

Today, we seem to be down to VoIP and OTT, but OTT is simply VoIP without any dedicated hardware. But depending on who you talk to, VoIP means an IP PBX (News - Alert), a cloud service, a SIP trunk into an IP PBX, OTT.  Yet VoIP doesn't get a lot of verbal play when it is used to aggregate and transport long distance calls at lower cost.   VoIP enabled a wave of cheap calling card and international long distance calling.

Microsoft (News - Alert) and its many (and growing) business partners don't use the term VoIP much. It's all Lync and enterprise voice and telephony in the first introduction and maybe VoIP raises its head later in the discussion, but only after UC has appeared once or twice.

Surrounding the legacy mindset of VoIP is the long-term stovepiping of voice over the past decade in UC applications and in treating it as a unique data type. With the exception of major call centers, voice has been kept in its own little box.  The only major "advance" to catch on over the past decade has been "visual" voice mail, where phone messages are transcribed into text and then emailed. 

Voice can now be treated as any other type of information -- stored, analyzed, indexed, and mined for insights in the world of Big Data.  It doesn't matter if it is VoIP or PSTN that ends up as the starting point for collecting information because the latter will get converted to a digital form.

But people are stuck in their existing mindsets. It  was bad enough talking to service providers and vendors over the past five years about HD voice being better than narrowband voice.  Defending the party line meant that they had the "best" narrowband voice; introducing HD voice as a better alternative didn't fit into the party line because they had the "best voice" and there was nothing better.

At some point in time, the telephony world will need to stop thinking of themselves as special and dump the reference to "phone."  It can start by dumping VoIP and focusing on voice as information.