sundance-communications.com/forum Forums VOIP Phones & IP PBX VoIP & Cloud Phones, Hosted PBX, General IP Phones Is VoIP cheaper for the carriers?

I listened in on a VoIP webinar yesterday. Blah, blah, blah. I came away with the impression that carriers think VoIP will be cheaper for them. (And I suppose give them better profit margins)
Seems like they would be happy with the staus quo. But then maybe they are fearful that the cable companies are gonna step in and start taking business from them.
Thoughts?

I work with alot of carriers. One of my favorite stories is the customer implements one of the larger companies that was one of the last big providers to get into local service. We got the PRI up after holding their hand but soon found there was only 1 local exchange that we could not dial. Had to show them 3 times that the switch ARS was not causing the issue. After 2 weeks and multiple engineers we found that this NXX was routed via VoIP to another CO. THey swear they couldn't fix it and wouldn't cause they would have to route it out a DS3 that connected them to the outside world. They were trying to eliminate these high dollar pipes and combine the voice over the existing data pipes. Makes sense that they could save money by eliminating infrastructure costs but I was blown away that their official opinion was it couldn't route via VoIP. Customer forced them to route the call via DS3 and the problem was solved.

VoIP makes a lot of sense since so much can be done with space in otherwise unused bandwidth in traditional circuit structure. Now if they can make it actually work, then I will be impressed. Give it a year or two and I will be willing to look deeper into it. With VoIP in it's third generation now and it's still full of bugs, I am waiting for the jury to return this time.

NuVox is a CLEC in our area that uses Sonus for LD. Has had major problems.

https://www.sonusnet.com/contents/products/

Ed do you really think that it will improve in a couple of years? Cell phones have been around long enough and the quality/service still S###S. As long as people throw lots of money to the vendors then they won't change. The only way we'll see Voip improve will be if people refuse to use the poor service and demand better.

Back in 2002 I tried out a VOIP gateway made by Net2Phones. I was told by the sales rep that AT&T owned over 30% of the company but it was being hush-hush.

https://web.net2phone.com/home_english.asp

Merritt:

Trust me, that's exactly where I was going. I know that a year or two from now it's still going to be the same that it was ten years ago. There are simply too many issues that are out of our control when using this technology. If it worked, then it would be great, but that's just it. It doesn't. I guess my original comment was meant to be more tongue-in-cheek.

Interestingly, I had a long conversation with the VP of an equipment manufacturer today on this subject. I explained that it's just too risky to put all of my eggs in one basket as a small business owner. I can't afford to take a system back when it doesn't work like it was promised, especially when it costs three times what the plain old system the customer wanted would have. IP relies way too much upon unseen variables, such as existing network volume, appropriate switches/hardware, and of course, the Internet for networking.

His comment to me was "But everyone is used to dropped calls due to the cell phone revolution. It's not uncommon to have to call someone back and people understand it nowadays". Yeah, OK.

Tell my telemarketing customer that it's not a problem; that the customer will call back when there's less network congestion; they're used to it. Not in my line of work and certainly not in my lifetime.

Ed your point is very valid and well spoken in my opinion . I still would like to know how 911 over voip works ? Someone enlighten me please .

Sure, it's cheaper. You're stuffing more stuff down the pipe. Can they deliver it, who knows. I'm sure they will be able to one day.

Maybe cheaper for them but maybe not cheaper for me if I have to upgrade my switch to accomadate it

Richard