This year visit to Stockholm reveled a different VoN than we were accustomed so far. It showed a VoN which doubled its volume from the last edition, both as number of visitors and number of exhibitors. But also showed a VoN which brought almost no innovations or new ideas or concepts.

This transformation is a perfect mirror of the VoIP market situation: the technological evolution reached a mature level making out of VoIP a trustful business area. Companies move out from the expectation state and start deploying the technology for business purposes.

The VoIP market (at all levels - end-users, retailers, providers) is in full expansion, markets and services being aggressively disputed between the players; or, as one of the speakers, James Enck, a European Telecom Analyst from Daiwa Securities SMBC Europe has put it: "it will be a total annihilation war between telcos for ruling the markets".

One of the hottest topic at VoN 2005 was the tremendous boost of Skype relatively to SIP. I approached this subject in a discussion with Henry Sinnreich and some interesting ideas popped up: the multitude of vendor for SIP (versus unique-vendor for Skype) leads in interoperability problems; also the slow response of IETF to the feedback coming from SIP industry leads to a discrepancy between standard and the implementations which are again translated in interoperability problems. On the other hand, Skype comes with a monolithic and close service model which prevents Skype from being cloned or interconnected. As the involved characteristics have long-term impact, for the moment no predictions can be made about how the VoIP market will be shared between Skype and SIP.

The overall impression was that VoIP, disregarding what shape it takes, reached its maturity making it a more and more tempting alternative to the classical PSTN telephony.

By Bogdan-Andrei Iancu