October 2000

Dear Tom:
I liked your article, but I have a couple of issues with VoIP. Haggling over VoIP's QoS standards could render VoIP as useless as HDTV has been for the last 20 years (in the consumer market). The Internet as we know it works OK as long as there is there is excess capacity. The variable response times at peak hours are acceptable now with just screens.

The QoS issue and retrofitting, service providers all agree, could be a nightmare. Technology is not the issue, it's just that this thing (VoIP) cannot take off until the rules are stable. Think of the nasty stuff that happened for Java standards between Sun, Netscape, and Microsoft. Although I am a staunch Republican, this is one area where an unbiased third party needs to enforce standards (as in the original telephone networks) in order for consumers to benefit. Some form of government intervention could help; the problem is the smarts would have to come from the private players, so I'm not sure even the government could be unbiased.

What is the likely scenario? From a business perspective, you are right on the money. This just makes sense. Without a regulated way to handle the bandwidth issues and the real-time nature of voice, this world where we voice-click a browser and talk to an agent could happen next year or 50 years from now. It will be like the freeway system. Building more lanes will only work for a short while. We need a stable set of QoS standards across all service providers and equipment manufacturers for VoIP in the consumer market to become a standard part of the call center business. I hope it is next year, but I am not holding my breath. Go to a trade show and ask every VoIP vendor how they can assure VoIP connectivity. This is always some other party's concern. For now, we have a "cart before the horse" scenario.

As far as the call center programming not being required, I think serious call centers will want to differentiate themselves, as branding will be even more important with the Web. Cool features will dominate, and these will be exceptions for all the Fortune 2000. Smaller call centers may get away with just filling out the standard form. Shrink-wrapped applications are the dream of any supplier. Unfortunately, our customer always want to push the technology for that edge, which translates to programming.
--Art Reisman

Tom Keating responds:

Thanks for the feedback. The issue here is if people really started using VoIP, it would become more erratic. I'm not saying that it would be of no use, but we are a long way from two-way live feeds of voice, music, etc. What makes me mad is this is a relatively easy problem to solve. The cellular phone network is tenfold more complex. Even if we were down to one standard, there would be subtle enough differences in interpretation to render interoperable useless without strong third-party regulation. Either that or a consumer willingness to use it with all the glitches. In India, rolling blackouts are the norm. I don't think the power company could add any amount of features to their basic service and get away with rolling blackouts. The analogy follows that people are not going to tolerate crap voice services for cool data features even at the consumer level. 

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