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Yes, slavery to traditional telecoms and carriers.

Please rise your hand if you are a VoIP provider that is completely independent from carriers and telecoms. You can’t rise your hand, right? Unless you are a Telecom…

This brief introduction just to follow up to Alec’s post and state that VoIP providers face a big problem everyday. Most popular VoIP services out there sometimes are judged in terms of the overall quality that carriers (a 3rd party) can provide them.

Most of the time, in order to provide cheap calls, VoIP providers strictly bind their services to this or that carrier that not always can guarantee a proper quality of service. Dropped calls, poor quality and so on.

Taking Skype away, how many calls are “on-net” between users belonging to the same VoIP provider (or, thanks to peering) to other VoIP providers rather than being directed to landline or mobile phones worldwide ? A very little percentage.

Unfortunately my company had to deal with this kind of problems and it’s not that easy. You provide a service to a client and if your dear “friend” carrier betrays you, the risk to loose the client is always behind the corner. In the past, we had to sue a carrier because a big problem we had with a customer (tempted to write here the name, but prefer to avoid…). Do they care?

Most of the times carriers don’t care. If you’re not that big, you’re not a big problem for them. If you can’t put up with their quality, simply give up and move to another carrier. If you want very low rates, you have to deal with these problems.

Is there a solution? Companies like FWD are pushing the dream that users can be finally free from carriers and telecoms. Unfortunately is not that easy and in most context it’s painful. Mobile phones are becoming more and more the primary communication means for many businesses so you deal with them everyday. Can you refrain from calling them?

Telecoms still have the “power” and can control the final users as well as controlling most VoIP providers. Let me say, incumbents and carriers are the “Google” of VoIP. I mean that they have the power to make a VoIP service successful or not, like Google has the power to make a website successful or not (can someone state the contrary?). Yes, this comparison is a little bit “forced”, but it makes sense.

In conclusion, VoIP is still slave of Telecoms and it takes time to change this ecosystem, we have to put up with it. Unfortunately, there’s nothing we can do. If you have a good idea on how we can solve this big problem, I’m happy to “hear” it, please leave a comment.

alec saunders, luca filigheddu, telecoms, voip