An Odd Reluctance To Save Money

Despite the hype and press surrounding VOIP, cheap internet telephony to the lay-man, a recent study by Forrester Research analyst Larry Velez shows that only 25% of European firms will have adopted the service in one form or another by the end of 2005, and that less than half have spent a penny on investing in VOIP.

The reasoning behind the failure to shift over to VOIP largely comes down to cost. While VOIP itself can save millions on company phone bills themselves, switching an entire firm over to internet telephony can be a large and painful short term cost.

In order to properly set up a VOIP service one needs to invest in staff training and replacement of traditional handsets with either VOIP compatible ones or headphones (though no extra cost there for companies already using them). On top of this many firms would be well advised to invest in extra bandwidth to take the load of the VOIP calls, and would probably need to hire an extra tech support handyman to do all the running when things such as firewalls start messing with the service.

Does this then mean that the hype surrounding VOIP is all just fizzle? Well, it shouldn't be. Companies large and small need to get off their backsides and swallow the short term pain in order to reap the long-term gains. Yes, switching over to VOIP will take a lot of planning and probably involve a week of severe pain, not to mention costs. But long-term the great hidden cost in business that is the phone bill will be slashed.

How does a ballpark figure of two Euro cents a minute to most parts of the world sound compared to traditional telecom bills? And all those free calls between employees already set up on the network, and to the employees of any other companies utilizing a VOIP service? Over the long term the savings made in business will be reaped back in abundance for investments elsewhere.

Smaller businesses and start-ups meanwhile can reap the benefits of VOIP from the word go. TG Publishing is not, in the grand scheme of things, a massive company and we've switched to using VOIP almost exclusively for all our telecommunications. I can grab almost anyone in the company during the day, be it our server team to bemoan a technical fault, our coordination team to bemoan an editorial fault or one of the other managing editors to bemoan all the moaning.

I've even begun to work up a small but growing contact book in Skype of small PR and technology firms who have seen the light and jumped onto technologies answer to boot strapper's dreams. As much as I may be pushing for major companies to move towards VOIP, it's in the small to medium sized businesses where I foresee the best growth in 2006. Still, until the major companies come onboard (and once one or two go wholesale into VOIP, everyone will be doing it) we'll all be wasting far too much money on telecoms - all those two cents a minute spent dialling out to the unconverted is still wasted money.

Until this idealised vision of total VOIP saturation comes about we will all still need to maintain a good old fashioned PSTN phone in the office, though saying that I've recently been considering ditching the ones we have here in the Tom's Hardware UK office in favour of Skype's voicemail service and the SkypeIn number which would allow old fashioned big spenders to ring our Skype numbers from their PSTN phones.

The only market currently relatively safe from VOIP is that of the mobile telephone, as not everybody is in Wi-Fi coverage enough of the time to be able to link through to a VOIP network, but here's to seeing what some industrious types can come up with to solve that problem.

2006 will be the year of the SMB in VOIP (though it'll just be another year in the millennium of acronyms), and I look forward to seeing more entrepreneurs cop on to the savings they can make using the service from the word go. Larger organisations can be forgiven for not making the change wholesale just yet, though there's no excuse for not even bothering to pilot it in a few departments to see what happens.