Forward Movement - A Gradual Approach (Cont'd)

While the margin may be low for many VoIP operators, it is still a major element of their bundled offerings, and many of the incumbent carriers and cable companies are counting on VoIP to round out their triple-play promotions. Qwest, for one, is already offering a packet-based integrated access service, and was an early entrant with its softswitch-based hosted IP telephony service.

It's not just the competitive upstarts like Vonage that are getting into the VoIP market, either. Entrenched incumbents are being forced by competitive challenges to make similar offerings. AT&T, Verizon, and Quest all have VoIP offerings. Yankee Group notes that "by the end of the decade, traditional incumbent providers will begin migrating plain old telephone service (POTS) customers to their IP networks." Yankee Group also notes that these changes will result in 17.5 million consumers, in the US alone, subscribing to local VoIP services by 2008.

If VoIP is to reach its greatest potential, however, the security challenges must be addressed at the service provider level. As yet, subscriber volume is still below capacity, and consumers, though moving towards acceptance of the technology, still believe that it could be subject to security issues. Although a well provisioned VoIP infrastructure is in fact quite secure, consumer perception is what rules, and the only way to win acceptance is to provide the most rigorous security possible. According to Harris Interactive, among adults who are aware of, but are not using VoIP, 60 percent believe it could be subject to security and privacy issues. Regardless, service providers received good news from the survey. Among those who use VoIP, satisfaction levels are high, and most users are happy with the service and are projecting to achieve a considerable savings from its use.

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