VoIP.. dead.. what ?

Alec Saunder made a post in his blog recently entitled 2008: The Year that VoIP died. His blog is very popular in the VoIP/Tech community so the post just had to trigger a lot of responses and a dabate on whether VoIP is or isn't dead. I'm listing below some of the posts that I find interresting.

Jeff Pulver responds with VoIP is NOT Dead!.

Andy Abramson with Putting VoIP In It's Place.

Alec Saunder again with VoIP: "If you hadn’t nailed its feet to the perch, it’d be pushin’ up the daisies!".

Luca Filigheddu and his post VoIP ? What is It ?

Jeff Pulver continues with VoIP Still Isn’t Dead - Part II.

Saunder again and All we’re talking about is arbitrage.

And then Dan York makes his post Define "VoIP" - and then we can debate whether it is dead!.

While I agree with Jeff Pulver, Andy Abramson and Luca Filigheddu, I think Dan York precisely hits the spot and puts the end to the discussion. VoIP is understood differently by different people, depending on the context and part of the industry they are associated with. For myself 'VoIP' without any context is just a technology, a group of concepts, protocols, codecs - it's the pipelines. VoIP is not a service, it'a a technology that allows to create services.

The first and most popular services created with VoIP were the 'cheap Internet telephone calls' - but theses like PSTN are bound to die - and true 2008 might have been the year the 'cheap Internet telephone calls' died. Or rather - making business from 'cheap Internet telephone calls' died. Why ? Because there are thousands of ITSP's, and they push the margins to absolute minimum. Because mobile calls are now cheap and its just much faster and more convenient to call from your mobile than the PC or hassle of buying installing configuring that VoIP gateway.

As for for the VoIP as technology - c'mon ! it's doing better than ever. It is the underlying voice technology, it's mainstream, it's ITU, 3GPP and Open Source.