Over the last couple of weeks the blogosphere has been up in arms in
response to claims that the VoIP industry is dead or dying. In fact,
most widely read bloggers have addressed this supposition. For example
Alec Saunders wrote a part 1 and 2 response, John Arnold, Andy Abramson, Ken Camp wrote blogs responding, Jeff Pulver also wrote a part
1 and 2 response, Shidan Gouran, Ted Wallingford
Ted Wallingford, Dameon Welch-Abernathy (Phone Boy), Rich Tehrani and many others all responded to the VoIP is Dead thread.

VoIP will completely reshape the telecom industry. The first
rumblings of the cataclysmic shake up on the horizon came this week
with Nortel’s bankruptcy filing.
It is the first in what will be a long line of old school telecom
companies imploding under the pressure of a change in the market akin
to the Model-T replacing the horse and buggy as the primary mode of
transportation in the world. The old model of delivering advanced call
control features and functionality through a premise based phone system
is dying a slow death. As customers grow more aware of the incredible
stability, business tools, and lower life time costs benefits of VoIP
the faster they will flee PBX manufacturers.

Increased network speeds, and advances in software have
improved VoIP to such an extent it no longer makes business sense to
invest in a premise based system of any sort. All of the fortune 500
companies and more than 82% of law firms nation wide have already made
the leap onto the VoIP that is barreling forward into the new
millennium. Cloud computing is not just a cool hot concept for the
moment it is a hard reality. Those telecom companies that do not adapt
quickly enough will die a slow death. The PBX has less than a decade of
real life left in it. Any company that is still pushing the PBX in 2020
will be as viable as a business as buggy whip manufacturers were in
1920.

The dot com bubble
is going on a decade ago, and VoIP is growing stronger daily by
stealing more and more market share from the traditional players.
Companies like M5 Networks,
which grew more than 53% during the 2008 down market, are quickly
eroding the customer base of traditional telecom companies such as Nortel, and Avaya
Avaya.
And the main difference is their voice as a service model (VaaS) is
very difficult to poach from. Customers routinely become loyal to their
provider and remain for years at a time. Since there is no major
hardware to change and service is exceptional few companies leave. It
is only a matter of time before VoIP completely rules the telecom
world.