VoIP: April 2004 Archives

In the Seattle Times, Kim Peterson, their technology reporter has a question and answer session with Michael Wehrs. He is the director of technology and standards at the company's mobile devices division. I found several of his answers interesting, especially when he talked about the future of telephone service, cell and PSTN, first in ten years, secondly in five years.

Q. What will we see 10 years from now in this business? Will we even have cellphones anymore?

Wehrs: I think the things that you will see are significant changes in user interface. The idea that you have to pick up and dial a phone probably will be gone 10 years from now. The mode switching between doing a data thing or a voice thing, that will all be gone. You'll generally interact with your device via voice or via screen, but the idea that you're doing either/or will go away. It will just be integrated in.

The devices will become combined and in general much smaller. The idea of personal area networks where devices share their capabilities and leverage each other, 10 years from now that will all work so that you may have a watch that you talk to. You may have just a headset that that becomes your earpiece and microphone. The actual phone will be something in your pocket or in your PC that you have with you, so it'll find a radio network to use and let you connect.

You will still have fashion statements in a phone. People will still have a cool device because it's cool to have one.

Q. What about five years from now?

Wehrs: You're still going to see predominantly handsets. You'll see the Moore's Law effect will have had a dramatic impact on the capability of these devices.

So whether they look like an appliance to you that just has a bunch of cool features, or whether they look like a device that you add new capabilities to, you'll see both in significant numbers, even though the hardware will probably be identical.

Half a gigabyte of storage, gigahertz processors, this will all be the norm five years out. Screen technologies and battery technologies that get you at that level of performance through an entire day of use will be the norm. You'll see multiple radios five years from now where today that's somewhat of a novelty.

You're going to see devices that simply work on whatever area network is out there, and they're smart enough to switch between them.

In an Infoworld article by Stephen Lawson, IDG News Service writes about the VoIP capabilities of Windows CE. Microsoft is including VoIP in all of its platforms, most visibly, though, in this Windows CE release.

This is a quote form the Microsoft website:

"VoIP Devices: Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) is a rapidly emerging technology for voice communication that uses the ubiquity of IP-based networks to deploy VoIP-enabled devices in enterprise and home environments. VoIP-enabled devices, such as desktop and mobile IP phones and gateways, decrease the cost of voice and data communication, enhance existing features, and add compelling new telephony services. Windows CE .NET 4.2 is a robust, real-time operating system that delivers a flexible, integrated platform for developing, marketing, and using a variety of VoIP-enabled client devices."

In fact, on the Microsoft site, they explain the value proposition for driving the substitution of traditional public switched telephone networks (PSTNs) and cellular networks.

"VoIP Industry Trends The overall United States telecommunications industry, including equipment and services, generated more than $600 billion in revenue in 2000.1 While VoIP is currently a small fraction of this, it is growing quickly. In North America, wholesale VoIP sales were estimated to approach well over $400 million in 2002.2 Total equipment purchases of VoIP gateways, soft switches such as IP Private Branch Exchange (IP PBX), and VoIP application servers are expected to reach almost $12 billion by 2006, a six-fold increase over 2001.3 Similarly, the revenue from selling wired enterprise IP phones may be in excess of $2.7 billion by 2006; this figure does not include mobile IP phones or phones used in private homes."

IMHO, Microsoft is poised to take over this market and actively drive substitution. You can bet that all the new versions of the OS will have VoIP as an integral component. It makes good business sense and they have all the infrastructure components in place to provide a compelling argument for a massive shift to VoIP.