IP-Telephony prospects
... And the following (thanks to Pat Mudge) report from the LA Times with WCOM Prez. John Sidgmore:
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"...WorldCom President John Sidgmore was a featured speaker at the Technology Summit, a Wall Street Journal-sponsored conference I attended recently in New York.
"Where is telecom headed?" Sidgmore was asked. His reply: "Internet, Internet, Internet."
Sidgmore pointed out that Internet traffic is growing at about 1,000% a year, while voice traffic is growing at only 10% a year, a figure that hasn't changed in decades.
Sidgmore then surprised the audience with this prediction: "In 10 years," he said, "when you look at what's being carried by telecom lines, you won't even know voice is in there."
Consider the fact that the U.S. market for voice-based services is $125 billion a year now, and his prediction takes your breath away. Sidgmore believes that the telecom industry will be a trillion-dollar industry early in the next century worldwide and that all the
signs point to the Internet as the key to its expansion.
Sidgmore noted, for example, that more than half of all international calls are faxes, and once Internet-based faxing becomes widespread, which should happen soon, that will punch a huge hole in the
market of conventional telecom carriers.
So will Internet telephony. The capability of the Internet to carry voice phone calls is limited now but likely to improve dramatically in the near term. New Internet telephony companies are springing up all over, mostly to capture the new business model of using corporate intranets to replace voicemail systems and PBX switchboards...."
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Excerpted from:
latimes.com. |
