VoIP 18 Years Later...Still VoIP
In 1995 an Israeli start-up, VocalTec, made global headlines by releasing a commercial software product called Iphone (yup, years before iphone there was a product called Iphone...). Iphone was the first commercial software package to become popular.
Thousands of articles appeared all over the world about "free phone calls" and the coming doom of the telecom industry.
Some of that was a "bit" pre-mature (more on that later), but VocalTec's initial popularity and media attention inspired a generation of entrepreneurs (I was blessed to be one of them, co-founding Delta Three, one of the world's first commercial VoIP service providers) and helped to eventually revolutionize the international telecommunications industry.
Part of our pre-maturity was that computers and networks were not ready for VoIP yet, so we mostly created a wholesale business providing rock-bottom rates to the international telecom players. Our customers were companies like AT&T, Cable and Wireless, Duetche Telecom and many others. A few years later computers and networks were ready for the launch of Skype and other consumer players, which finalized the complete destruction of the international pricing system.
I emphasize the international aspect because that is where the real revolution occurred. Recall that in 1995 the average price of a phone call from Tel Aviv to New York was $2 a minute, London to NY was $1 a minute.
Today international phone calls between most places are somewhere between free and pennies a minute, mainly due to the pressure of VoIP. Today Skype alone carries over 25% of the international voice traffic, as measured by Telegeography.
Over the past few years the formerly unconquered fields of mobile phones, tablets are slowly giving way to the ongoing VoIP wave (given the processing power of smartphones and mobile broadband). Companies like Viber, WhatsApp, and yes, even Skype have been adopted by hundreds of millions of mobile users, accelerating the next major upheaval, which is the move from expensive mobile plans to reasonable "all-you-can-eat" plans, with basically unlimited phone/SMS/Internet. That together with WiFi becoming more and more a part of the assumed digital fabric of life, means that more and more of the time we are "on-line," and the dreams of those of use who fantasized about Internet based communications are becoming more real.
But we still have a long way to go.
Inspired by my good friend Jeff Pulver, I recently co-founded with him a start-up (called Zula) to capitalize on the changing communications landscape, and bring to market a product that will introduce some joy and delight in how we initiate and maintain communications relationships -- and as much of that plays out these days over mobile devices, we have adopted a "mobile-first" product development strategy.
What we have discovered is that while much has changed, when working on mobile we still very much need to remember that one of the states of connectivity is off-line, and that there is a wide spectrum of states of connectivity and quality. When trying to design a product (that uses VoIP) that simply works we have to overcome many existing limitations of VoIP. We have checked all the leading VoIP products, and while some certainly work better than others, VoIP over mobile reminds me of the early days of VoIP on fixed internet. Only we ARE closer to our dreams.
I remember many years ago an Ericsson engineer telling me that people don't understand how much technical "magic" is involved in passing a live call from one cell to another, so that when people speed down a highway they can continue talking uninterrupted. Obviously this is on top of the core magic of wireless communications. Add to that challenge the data network, and trying to run real time communications apps on top of that network...and what is simple a "phone call" becomes the convergence of multiple streams of modern magic.
In the "old" days when you picked up a phone you heard something called dial tone -- which for my kids is almost a foreign concept. When we first started to commercialize VoIP we felt we need to fake some dial tone so people would think we were a real phone company. The same goes for hearing the ring-ring when calling someone. Today we choose what to hear, if we hear anything at all, during the time that the called party is notified that someone wants to talk to them.
I have been told many times over the past few years that the "young people" do not make phone calls anymore, that they use text for most of their conversations. I don't think this is only true amongst young people, as we all use email and other forms of textual communication to take the place of some of what we formerly could only accomplish with a phone call.
But that does not mean voice (and it's richer cousin, video) is dead. Far from it. But as VoIP enters prime time, and is looked upon not as a cheap/free alternative but as the core pathway for communications, we are challenged to keep the magic alive, and make the voice experience (what we use to call a "phone call") not only as good as it was, and is, but even better.
Even way back when it was mainly a wholesale replacement business, I preferred the term IP (Internet Protocol) Communications over Internet Telephony, or even Voice over IP, VoIP, which is how many techies still refer to it. IP Communications means we truly move the conversation, whether in the form of written text, voice, or video (or some combination thereof) to the internet, which today is reaching further and further across the globe.
The world is moving very fast, and we need to move faster if we want to stay ahead and develop products that finally allow people to do what was formerly impractical and impossible.
