EU taking position in VoIP
Thursday, October 25th, 2007
The 27 telecom regulators in the European Union, today announced they want harmonised rules for Voice over IP communications within the union. Until now, this is not the case and every country can impose rules on what is and what isn’t allowed for voice communications. This has made it increasingly difficult for VoIP startups who want to offer service in multiple European countries. Some countries allow the nomadic use of VoIP numbers, while some don’t, others won’t even allow you to sell a VoIP service without proof that your customer is a EU resident.
When we deploy VoIP systems with our customers, we usually recommend them to keep at least a few of their analog or ISDN lines. Many of them are surprised as they expect a VoIP system to be all IP based, they also wonder how they are going to save costs if they keep their existing lines. But keeping a link to the Plain Old Telephone System can be more interesting than you think.
If you’ve installed a Voice over IP system, chances are you’re using it to cater for your company’s telecommuters. Because, thanks to VoIP, employees are now completely set free and - most of them anyway - are able to work wherever they are. In a way, VoIP is really the last link in the chain to make mobile work fully equivalent to office work, laptops and virtual private networks already enabled the biggest part.
Techtionary wrote a whitepaper for XO communications detailing the 10 steps to a successful VoIP implementation. While I think it is a little biased, XO’s name is mentioned 48 times on just 15 pages - it raises some interesting points. For those not interested in reading the entire whitepaper, here’s a short list of the 10 steps.
There are some rumors floating around in the blogosphere of people moving away from VoIP. And these “rumors” are coming from early adopters, such as Telepocalypse’s Martin Geddes. While Martin definitely raises some interesting points, what troubles me is the lack of clear separation between Internet based telephony services such as Skype and businesses IP telephony systems.