Along with mobile data, tablets and the cloud, VoIP is one of the technology mega-trends that has swept the globe in the last few years.
Growth, you say? According to Infonetics Research, VoIP will experience revenue growth of $76.1 billion in 2015.
The results of this growth will not all be positive for consumers or providers, though.
“Projected growth can lead to an influx of new innovations, new services, and other new offerings,” Michael Ventimiglia recently wrote in the GetVoIP.com blog. “However, chief amongst these new additions is providers. It seems likely that as the service becomes more popular and expands, more and more companies will look to jump on the bandwagon. While this can be beneficial for users, it can also be very harmful.”
That’s because with more providers, increasingly it will become hard for users to determine which service they should choose. When there were only a relatively few offerings, from Vonage to Skype (News - Alert) to a few other vendors, selecting the right VoIP service was reasonably straightforward. But with the number of providers today, selecting the right one can be confusing.
“Users can end up feeling overwhelmed by the sheer number of services, products, and providers at their disposal—i.e. too much too soon can be harmful,” wrote the blog.
Further, quality might suffer with the glut of VoIP options and the pressure to add features to attract and retain customers.
“Companies may expand their offerings. While this can be beneficial for users, expanding services may stretch providers too thin—which can ultimately result in quality loss,” noted the blog post.
“While more experienced users are in a better position to answer these questions—and to root out inferior services—newer, less knowledgeable users may select lesser providers/services/products as a result of their inexperience. Subsequently, with a lackluster solution/provider, it’s likely that users will be under-whelmed with VoIP, which ultimately can lead to a drop off of interest in the service,” it added.
The growth will benefits users as well, though.
The positive side of increased competition is reduced price and new features. To differentiate, VoIP operators will need to continue innovating and adding functionality.
A good example of this can be seen with smartphones.
“Apple (News - Alert) introduced their first iPhone to distinguish themselves from other smartphones,” GetVoIP said. “In doing this, the company essentially created the new standard for similar devices. This has already begun to an extent. Providers already pursue a number of different patents for new technologies/applications. For example, 8x8, Inc has had a total of 86 patents awarded to them.”
So VoIP growth will be good for users and also sometimes bad for them. Kind of like life.
Edited by Rachel Ramsey