In all honesty Hal I think wireless communications will be the death of both. Already the kids don't talk on their IPhones, they just text and send pictures. We've noticed a sudden and increasing spike in hang ups on our customer's voice mail systems everywhere. The only thing we can attribute this to is the new hire employees, whom are young people, won't use voice mail.

I see this even among my employees, they'll text me versus calling me. It drives me crazy because I have to put my reading glasses on to see the phone. :bang:

I didn't really expect this much animosity when I started this thread. My sole reason was to point out some observations concerning VOIP implementation for the SMB customer. It's extremely obvious from the responses in this thread, even from the VOIP supporters, that VOIP isn't the proper solution for the small business.

Actually I realize now that VOIP is not going to have the market penetration on the small side that I was concerned about. Even the supporters here seem to kick out the "it runs fine on the same network" mantra that the VOIP salesmen preach or the simplicity and reliability of small key systems.

I had to laugh at the "the system calls you when the internet goes down" comment. I attending a sales presentation at one of my customers when the VOIP saleman said that. I pointed out to him the customer would be pretty stupid to not realize their 200+ phones quit working. It seemed about as silly as having one of my TDM switches call me when a PRI goes down, as if the customer doesn't already call me and bitch on their cell phone.

I think a few things need to happen here, simplified software, programming and wiring coupled with a true universal standard for SIP. Either that or back to the model of proprietary phones and control like the TDM manufacturers. 3com, Cisco, Allworx, etc seem to do relatively well following this idea. Like the SNOM site I linked to and commented on, endless firmware and software revisions on non standardized SIP trunking and VOIP implementations will be nothing but a mess on the open system VOIP implementations.

We see this already when a company's IT guys quit and the new hires spend huge amounts of time trying to figure out just what's going on with the IT structure. Consider they are dealing with pretty much standardized OS's on standardized network layers and protocol. They're dead if they come in cold on their IP system. Does anybody remember the endless versions and revisions on the SL1? It was a nightmare trying to remember and/or document what version/revision did what and was compatible with what. I see VOIP as being on the orders of magnitude worse unless somebody someplace requires universal standards for at least protocols.

I'll say this, the telcom business never gets boring. In some regards I think the TDM/VOIP debate is sort of like the endless Chevy/Ford debate, both forgot something else (wireless, Toyota) is out there. In our world I see future generations of an instrument similar to the IPhone being a huge threat to ALL of us. We may not use or understand it much but the kids coming up will be married to such a communication device, both for personal and business use. I've already installed a couple of switches with PRI's that do nothing but reroute calls to cell phones. The voice mail is purely an auto attendant. I believe there's already a number of hosted solutions to do the exact same thing.

Oh well, in another 6 or 7 years I won't have to worry about this any more.