Top 10 VoIP Predictions for 2007

There were enough new VoIP products, deals, VC rounds and Voice 2.0 buzz in 2006 to keep a small army of bloggers busy. VoIP News asked some of the most influential VoIP bloggers to gaze into their crystal balls and report back what they think might happen in the coming year. Here are their replies:

---

---

1. Cablecos will continue to win the battle in consumer VoIP, but Vonage will survive—they're the independent of choice for most people, and not everybody will want to give all their business to a big phone or cable company.

Jon Arnold, Jon Arnold's Blog

2. The FCC begins to look at all VoIP as phone service and applies E911 rules.
Andrew Abramson, VoIP Watch

3. Pure-play VoIP providers [will] start taking cues from new players like GrandCentral and TalkPlus. So, instead of just getting dialtone and voicemail on your Vonage, hopefully by this time next year, you'll have all the cool telephony features you get from somebody like TalkPlus. In 2007, pure-players will either provide value or die out.
Ted Wallingford, Signal to Noise

4. Vendor consolidation will continue, as Tier 1/2 vendors acquire smaller vendors to round out their portfolios. Expect to see companies like Sonus, Audiocodes and Tektronix making some deals.
Jon Arnold, Jon Arnold's Blog

5. The SipPhone/Gizmo Project gets acquired.
Andrew Abramson, VoIP Watch

6. We see companies like Iotum that have a relevance engine to tie in Messenger and Outlook, so we see not only that you’re in a meeting, but who you’re meeting with, and whether it should interrupt.
Ken Camp, telecom writer-speaker-analyst, Digital Common Sense

7. From a standpoint of changing the end-user experience, [the Siemens OpenStage SIP phone] is the biggest change to the telephone set since the ‘60s. ... 2007 will be the beginning of change in the handset—what does it look like and its feature set.
Ken Camp, telecom writer-speaker-analyst, Digital Common Sense

8. Security will be a big issue within the VoIP industry as enterprises start to get serious about the technology and look to make sure they have the systems in place to protect themselves properly.
Mark Evans, Mark Evans: A Canadian Take on Telecom and Technology

9. More than 200,000 Chinese people per day (on some days) are downloading, installing and starting to use Skype. This is the definition of disruption.
Oliver Starr, MobileCrunch

10. I definitely see voice features becoming an integral part of the way customer-service applications, enterprises, and publishers use the Web. Voice-based communications through a Web trigger or hyperlink is becoming more common and will be even more so in 2007, thanks to aggressive moves by Adobe to add VoIP into Flash, and thanks to upstarts like Sitòfono.
Ted Wallingford, Signal to Noise