Voice isn't Dying | Hacker News Reader

Voice isn't Dying

blog.2600hz.com

9 pointsjosh26004 comments

Great post Josh. I agree 100%! Voice is much different than when I was climbing poles 13 years ago. The overall landscape is changing. The demand for more bandwidth means VoIP is going to just keep getting better and better. That coupled with better compression like WebRTC will help companies move to a more agile solution. The days of the heavy box PBX are coming to an end.

I'm actually bearish on the end of massive PBX systems. Frankly, I still see value for them, and given that there are a number of crossbar systems still in production, I don't think they're going to completely disappear. Think about how many pagers are still in service?!?!

We, at 2600hz, think that voice cost structures are going the way of the dodo, thanks largely to IP and the migration away from copper. Voice as a service has to evolve to handle the demands of a connected world.

In my personal opinion, I see voice as the method of last resort, but the critical lynchpin of communication. SMS and email are fantastic when you can handle an asynchronous response, but when push comes to shove you better believe I'm ringing the phone.

Lastly, on the subject of WebRTC; I believe it will rock for small conferences but it's anything BUT agile at scale.

Consider a 10 person video call. If I use a polycom bridge there are 2 streams coming from any given participant; one in, one out. This is not the case with WebRTC.

With WebRTC, I have one stream to each participant; ergo 90 total stream and (at 300kbps streaming) that's 2.7mbps per participant. The numbers only get worse as you scale.

My contention is that WebRTC is a product for a mesh world and we live in a Hub n' Spoke reality. It will be hard for WebRTC to compete at scale.

Big box PBXs are just going to be dumb switches. There will still be a need but just to route traffic from another service. Softphones will get better, SIP phones will become cheaper, and cloud communications will become more feature robust. The ability to create a phone system in the cloud with the same features as an enterprise PBX is becoming easier. Within the next 5 years virtual cloud communications will eclipse what folks like Avaya, Siemens, and Cisco have been doing for a while. Even Avaya is seeing the writing on the wall. A few years ago they stopped rebranding the HP Pro Curves. They've been saying for years that they just want to be a software company. Today, they are playing catch up.

>Big Box PBXs are just going to be dumb Switches.

They already are ;).

What's really changing in our industry is the barrier to entry. It doesn't cost $100M to compete with AT&T anymore; anyone can do it with $20 and an AWS account. That is going to bring transformative change and companies that can't respond will die (this cycle happens about once a generation in telecom and results in industry consolidation).

Avaya is funny; those HP Pro Curves worked fine but paying 2x markup for the Avaya brand name never made sense to me.

This is the classic innovator's paradox. Companies like Avaya can either be Motorola or Lenovo; and today I'd rather be Lenovo by a wide margin. Wake up and change it up or face the consequences.

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