Sheryl and I had the opportunity to meet Dan Berninger briefly on our recent road trip to Seattle and Vancouver with Jeff Pulver. Dan's one of the sharpest minds in the industry when it comes to VoIP and a view of the industry direction.

Here's some insight from Dan on the state of VoIP and some of the impact of SIP. I've written quite a bit lately about SIP and the role it plays in both call completion and in trunking technology. Dan drives the point home in one sentence -- The state of affairs is analogous to printing email before it reaches the destination in order to preserve a role for the post office.

Telerupted: Twilight for Telephone Networks

Session initiation protocol-compatible VoIP devices already account for as much as 20 percent of landline telephone traffic, thanks to the efforts of companies like Cisco, which sells to enterprises, and Comcast (in the U.S.) or Free (in France), which target consumers. Mobile telephones will not remain a safe haven for long, however, as more companies like Fring and Truphone start to offer VoIP alternatives to operator voice plans.

Such plans involve downloaded SIP User Agent software that can also voice-enable gadgets like the Nintendo DS, Sony PSP or iPod Touch. Dan Borislow claims the marketing blitz for his SIP-based magicJack puts him on track to sell 500,000 of the devices by the end of this month. Yet the displacement of analog phones by VoIP devices has not displaced the telephone network itself.

[Read Dan's full post]

There's one area where I don't agree with Dan's assessment, He says "It will take at least another decade for the forces at work to play out, but this provides little consolation for an industry that traces its roots to 1876 and telco executives unable to retire before the music stops." I think the legacy telco industry is far closer to the grave than that, if, and it's a big if, we count mobile services, including cellular, as part of the infocom universe.

Legacy wireline telephone services are a vanishing breed and the telco of the past is just a brontosaurus. There's no place for the legacy phone company in the world of unified communications.

Technorati Tags: Dan Berninger, telco, legacy, twilight, VoIP