More service providers -- such as iiNet, Telstra and TPG -- are expected to launch consumer VoIP by mid year, IDC says. They will lob in the residential VoIP space already inhabited by the likes of engin and Freshtel.
“It’s certainly shaping up to be a big year,” says Ilkka Tales, CEO of Mobile Innovations, which owns the company engin.
“There’s a lot of smaller players coming into the market and a few international VoIP providers.” There may be dozen players with their eyes on the consumer VoIP market, he says.
In December 2004, Unwired cooled off a proposed trial of its VoIP offering to Sydney residents. Some of the reasons behind the re-think included the rise of free VoIP products and the heavy discounting going on in mobile phone offerings, which was tempting consumers to do away with fixed landlines in their homes.
IDC’s Landry Fevre says Unwired may have been a little ahead of itself when it announced its residential VoIP plans.
“It’s tricky, especially with spectrum usage. Voice is very demanding in terms of spectrum and also in terms of quality of network. Unwired has a little ironing out of its network and tweaking of the base station before they go into this space,” says Fevre.
From a start-up point of view, it is not as easy as people think, says Tales. "You need funding, you need distribution channels to take the product to market, you need a product that’s reliable and scalable, you need a billing system and staff that can manage that effectively, and you also need to be able to comply with the regulatory environment.”
“At this point in time, Australia’s regulators say, 'If it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, it must be a duck’, so we’re operating in that sort of framework,” he says.
Some of the things that concern regulators about VoIP are issues over quality of service, vulnerability to software viruses, consumer education and managing expectations, access to emergency services, lawful intercepts and power supply.
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| engin's Tales: Shaping up to be a big year |
The Department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts (DCITA) also highlights concerns about VoIP services being compatible with other types of equipment the consumer has, such as older ADSL modems and special communications needs of people with speech and hearing impairments.
To get residential VoIP to capture the attention of consumers on a grand scale, it has to be truly plug-n-play -- straightforward and foolproof enough for the average person to cope with installation.
“If the consumer doesn’t like it, then the product won’t survive,” says Freshtel’s CEO Michael Carew.
Then it is a matter of getting the message out to consumers, and making sure VoIP products and services mimic the standard telephone so closely it is barely noticed, he says.
Freshtel will launch a product in March that it claims is the first Australian-built ATA (analogue telephone adaptor). “It’s a plug-and-play device for a normal telephone,” Carew says. “We’re also working with PDA devices -- building interfaces with wireless PDAs so you can use your VoIP to anywhere else in the world.” Carew says the company is also making a centralised PBX and handset for the commercial market as well as the domestic market -- all built using Australian technology.
One of the issues being grappled with is being able to offer technical support to such a mass market as consumer VoIP and to be able to do that in a way that is satisfactory to the user and makes money for the service provider.
Nortel’s chief convergence architect, Mick Regan, says the consumer market has challenges because there is no control beyond the end point. “If the end user decides to tinker around with the home network, then the quality is going to go right down.” That is when you will get support issues and the consumer will point the finger at the product or the provider -- potentially badmouthing both.
Mainstream-managed VoIP services are still to hit the residential VoIP market. Express Data’s Ross Cochrane says in time the telcos will offer a managed IP service. “There’s no telco today that doesn’t have a plan to move all of their infrastructure into an IP environment,” he says.
Carew says about 60 percent of Australia’s ISPs -- through a group called Wholesale Communications Group -- will offer VoIP services to the consumer.
“It’s a lot easier for 100 ISPs to sell to a million people than it is for one large company to handle customer care for those million customers,” Carew says.
“With the Wholesale Communications Group, there are three levels of support. The simple questions will be taken up by the ISP, the more technical questions will be taken up by the Wholesale Communications Group, and the extremely technical questions will be taken up by the developer themselves, in this case, Freshtel,” Carew says.
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