The Future of Voice or OTT

OTT (Over The Top) Services means, amongst other things, VoIP. It means services that run over broadband networks that aren’t run by the companies that own those networks – BT et al.

When VoIP first began to be popular in the mid noughties, companies like Skype were called parasites by the telcos as they saw their revenues disappearing. A couple of years ago they were saying the same about the BBC’s iPlayer – it was/is eating large amounts of bandwidth which the BBC doesn’t pay for.

Of course this is all just special pleading – or whining as my mum used to say. The people paying for the broadband are the end users – you and me. We want these services and it’s not the content and service provider’s problem if those that sell the access products have got their pricing wrong because they’re all competing with the same ‘as much as you can eat for a fixed price’ business model.

At last week’s UC Expo, there was a session on the Future of Voice and the three experts gave their views.

Apparently, the current business process is broken and we need something else. The future is federated and interoperable. It’s agile and open source and it’s also lot like Facebook and Amazon.

And it’s all Over The Top.

So now you know.