Friend and colleague Andy Abramson put an interesting post up yesterday that's had me thinking a bit. What struck me as perhaps most telling is the title Andy chose.

Requiem For The Future of VoIP
 Om has pointed to an Aswath post regarding the winding down of the AOL Total Talk service.

Rather than look at it as a failure, my take on this is AOL really has seen the future sooner than others. Much like the BT announcement earlier this week about their softclient, and like their other online portal player competitors including Yahoo, Google and MSN, AOL’s Voice Team has seen the future of telephony and is moving in that direction with AIM PhoneLine, and the burgeoning ecosystem that already has started to bubble earlier this month at the VoIP Developer’s Conference, and will likely have a big boost at VON in Boston next month.

But unlike Yahoo and MSN who have so many internal battles to fight, AOL as part of Time Warner has leadership that is smart enough to not fight a marketer (Time Warner Cable) who wants to sell a phone 1.0 replacement, and instead is focusing on Phone 2.0 and where it can be.s

The driver for this conversation is really the AOL Total Talk service and recent announcements that they're going to be discontinued as of November 30th, but I think it goes much deeper, and Andy raises subtle points that are too often overlooked.

I'm not sure I agree with the Requiem for the future of VoIP thought, but I do see the end of an era.In thinking about it, I recall another colleague, Alec Saunders talking about Voice 2.0.  Andy sent me a note last night asking for my thoughts on his post, and it left my mind wandering through the taxonomy of voice at a very very high level. Here's what I came up with.

Voice 1.0 was dial tone. It's been around for over a hundred years. It's not sexy, but it's reliable. It's also a dying business. There's no fundamental growth in the delivery of dial tone. The legacy telcos are often in denial of this reality, but most recognize that they must develop new services to thrive.

Voice 1.1 and 1.2 introduced VoIP. The key is introduced. They consisted of early PC-tp-PC calling. I'd argue early Netmeeting was a form of Voice 1.1. Dialpad is probably a good example of Voice 1.2, enabling very basic communications across networks from the Internet to the PSTN. Bassic services. They gave us something new, but really only incremental advances.

Early Skype gave us Voice 1.3. Real PC-to-PC voice, coupled with some data-oriented services. Skype's evolutions puts them at several points within the evolution timeline for voice services, because they have continually developed, grown and advanced.

Voice 1.5 came along in the form of VoIP replacing dial tone. Vonage is the perfect example. Nothing new other than an alternate delivery of dial tone. Let's be honest, it was about pricing and they found a cheaper way to deliver dial tone, allowing them to erode the legacy telco market share slightly. And I'll posit that it was a very slight inroad into the market. They took a tiny piece of business away from the traditional carriers. They may have garnered a lot of attention, but in the grand scheme of telecommunications services, Vonage has really never been anything more than a blip on the radar screen.

Voice 2.0 began several years ago with true VoIP services, and is still developing for many. Media and signaling gateways provided true bridges between the IP and PSTN worlds. Not integration of the two environments, but linkages between the two. Visionaries like Jeff Pulver saw potential integration at new levels and we saw networks like FreeWorld Dialup begin to evolve.

Voice 2.5 introduced further enhancements in VoIP, but really took off in the past years. Voice 2.5 is a conceptual and pilot, or early adopter, phase. We saw real new development. iotum brought us presence as a feature of voice. BridgePort Networks showed us real convergence between fixed and mobile. Sure Skype, MSN and others gave us video with our voice, but SightSpeed gave us video collaboration at a new level - voice and video blur together as a more robust conversation tool.

Technical aside - There are a many other innovators involved in the Voice 2.5 evolution, but a couple of fundamental new shifts include evolving standards like SIP (10 years old, but evolving and still gaining momentum). Another shift in voice is the shift from codecs like G.711 and G.729 to broadband codecs like the GIPS codec, and video codecs like the one SightSpeed developed based on years of research. I think the key is that the innovators stopped trying to adapt PSTN technologies to packet networks (forcing a square peg in a round hole), and began to really innovate with a view toward maximizing packet technologies. I see this as a fundamental shift that was very slow in coming. Quit trying to embrace and encompass the PSTN and just leave it behind.

Voice 2.6 exists out there too. It's the parallel track of peer-to-peer technologies that haven't acheived mainstream adoption yet. Skype takes a lot of heat for its P2P roots. I know I give them my fair share of criticism. But they aren't alone. Some time back I interview Dmitry Goroshevksy at Popular Telephony, who's bringing Peerio to the market. There's a slow evolution in P2P technologies underway. While the technologies are maturing, their acceptance in enterprise business is evolving at a slower rate. But they can't be discounted or overlooked. Just as we've proven distributed computing is a viable model in the data center, distributed telecommunications with VoIP is proving quite successful. P2P communications is just a nuance of distributed computing that isn't fully matured and accepted today, but it's on the horizon and it's in our future.

Andy's post was entitled Requiem for the Future of VoIP. I posted yesterday about the community fo VoIP bloggers and how the number of us in the field indicates the penetration and success. Andy's title gives rise to remembering Requiem for a Heavyweight, and demonstrates that he, like many of us, sees VoIP as a heavyweight, not a contender. For many of us, PSTN voice is a childhood memory. Party lines and rotary phones were great in their day, but that day has long since passed.

And perhaps it is time for the Requiem for VoIP, because VoIP isn't the future. The future is Voice 3.0. And in that world, VoIP is just a facet of unified communications. Unified communications consisting of voice, video, presence, and user control coupled with fully converged services, including ubiquitous mobility and widespread application integration.

I think Andy's requiem is less a mourning of the past. VoIP isn't dying or going away. What Andy really said was welcome to the dawn of Voice 3.0. It's coming at us and we're in the early throes of jump-starting what will be fully unified communications.


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