Pipeline Publishing, Volume 7, Issue 4

	This Month's Issue:
	Livin’ on the Edge

AT&T on VoIP

By Matthew Clark and Tim Young

Oh, what a journey it has been for VoIP. There was a time, not all that long ago, that VoIP was considered by many to be a novelty. Then it grew into a low-cost, over-the-top option with reliability issues, before becoming more and more ready for primetime. It became fully disruptive when cablecos and the aforementioned over-the-top plays began to use it to chip away at voice market-share, and now it has reached the sort of maturity that didn’t seem feasible in the past.

Now, years after industry watchers began lamenting the death of the voice revenue and the billable minute, telcos have begun to fully embrace VoIP. Furthermore, with shrinking revenues and unit sales and the advent of 3G (and now 4G), mobile carriers are also beginning to embrace VoIP for fear of losing shares if they miss that boat.

Yet, this naturally presents a problem. Voice applications were by and large reprobates of not only land-locked companies, but of the smartphone carrier’s whose application access had opened the door for blockage and capacity maximization.

If the closing decade is marked as one of explosive growth of VoIP - in 2005 breaking the $1 billion revenue mark—then the new decade is poised to be one of innovation and finding a home for the rouge technology in mobile billing plans and operations.

“I want to talk about the whys and the challenges associated from a large-scale point-of-view.”

But Paradise isn’t worried or scared

The mobile market in the U.S. can be considered saturated, with penetration now exceeding 88 percent, according to Frost & Sullivan. With only marginal horizontal growth available, carriers are focusing more on vertical growth through innovative premium data services that run over next-generation wireless networks and devices. The emergence of a broad range of connected devices expects to push penetration of mobile services to more than 100 percent.

Over 60 percent of North American mobile subscribers regularly use text messaging, and a majority of these are part of a bundled data plan. The impact of smart phones in driving data usage on the mobile networks is beyond doubt.

In contemplating the future of VoIP, Pipeline took some time to speak to Mike Paradise, Assistant Vice President of IT Network Reliability Centers for AT&T, who reports that he sees a lot of challenges ahead for IT and data networks. New technology and user demand is changing the operational landscape, often leaving more questions than answers.

The biggest challenge is to ensure a satisfactory, pleasant, and useful consumer experience while delivering maximum value. Even though North American mobile operators protect the consumer experience, managing the end-user experience is not always possible since an increasing amount of traffic is increasingly causing several operational impediments.

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