I'm on the road in San Antonio this week and struggling to keep up with a lot of the blog and news conversations. Here's one I've been putting some thoughts into that I hope to write up on the plane ride home on Saturday. It the meantime, a link to three blog posts on the subjects. Om Malik gets credit for starting it in the blog cycle, but the question was really a conversation topic at the recent VoIP Developer conference too.

Who Will Really Make Money in VoIP?
Written by Om Malik

In the early days of WiFi, it was common wisdom to bet on service providers and aggregators to make money as the technology became popular. Somehow that did not work out as planned. Who even remembers names like Cometa that burnt through millions before becoming part of the great technology garbage dump.

In the end, the profits from WiFi, however miniscule ended up in the pockets of device makers such as Linksys, D-Link, Netgear. A step lower down the food chain, chip makers such as Broadcom, Atheros, Texas Instruments, and Marvell have profited from WiFi in varying degrees.

Om Ask VoIP Industy---"Show Me The Money"
Om asks where the money is? I say it's in add on applications and new services. The infrastructure costs have to be revenue neutral.

Look to areas like access, identity/directory and new apps......

Who will really make money in VoIP?

Om raises this question in a recent post with the same title. At one point it was fashionable to point out that VoIP is a product and not a service, even when the poster boy at that time was Vonage only to be replaced later by Skype. Vonage never pretended to be anything other than a service provider; Skype was giving away its product. I strongly believe that VoIP is a product alone. One requires two “services” for VoIP – directory service and NAT traversal service. A properly configured network does not require the latter and there is not much money to be made from the former. So there is not much money to be made from these two. Since the intelligence has moved to the edge anyway, there is no need for a provider for other services. Given that I am not surprised with Om’s observation that money is with the device manufacturers. But the difficulty is in convincing the investment community because they are still looking for ARPU based business models.

I also noticed Ted Wallingford and some others have offered thoughts. I'll chime in with mine in the next few days.