"VoIP is trapped in the mid-market space of companies with 200 to 300 seats," explained David Haynes, director of NEC business solutions whilst in Sydney to concrete a deal with ISP Pacific Internet. "A lack of bandwidth is the only thing holding back its future development into other market areas."
Since November 2000 NEC has been rolling out IP infrastructure to gradually replace Pacific Internet's traditional PBX, enabling a greater level of interconnectivity between branch offices, and more flexible practices such as hot-desking.
Pacific Internet's managing director, Dennis Muscat, said the major attraction associated with the VoIP infrastructure was the cost savings and improvements to services levels.
-We can now distribute incoming calls across our service centres, to take advantage of redundancies," Muscat said. -We are also saving substantially on our 1300 number, because calls can connect through the points of prescence we have in major cities and then be transferred for the cost of a local call."
While such a VoIP-based solution is ideal for an ISP, given its ability to leverage off its own infrastructure, it will be some time before consumers will enjoy access to such technology in their own homes.
-We will need broadband to be rolled out into people's homes before they have access to VoIP technology," Haynes said. -We have come to market with a hybrid model which allows companies to migrate to an IP solution without losing their investment on PABX technology, but at this stage we are focussing on the commercial marketplace."
Muscat also pointed out that although roughly 37 percent of Australian homes now benefited from Internet connectivity, less than 1 percent had access to broadband, effectively disabling any attempts to offer VoIP technologies into the domestic market.
-Once we see an expansion of broadband services, we will start to see a lot of technologies like VoIP become viable," Muscat said.
