WASHINGTON — The government is trying to jump start the promising but slow developing voice-over-IP (VoIP) market through a combination of deployments and evangelizing.
A key proponent of the VoIP is the Commerce Department, which over the last four months has deployed about 4,000 phones at its headquarters here. It is also planning to add more phones at the U.S. Census Bureau, according to Karen Hogan, the department's deputy chief information officer.
Hogan said all the agency's VoIP users have been consolidated on a single exchange. As a security measure, the agency's voice and data networks have been separated. Firewalls were also installed.
In an effort to promote the technology and, with it, broadband deployment, Commerce officials also hosted a VoIP roundtable on Wednesday (Feb. 12) to discuss the state of the market and the regulatory landscape. Predictably, equipment vendors at the meeting forecast growth for the technology in the United States, while an industry analyst said there was little interest among U.S. businesses to rip out existing voice networks and deploy VoIP.
"The market potential is huge," said Jeff Pulver, president and chief executive of pulver.com, a proponent of the technology. Pulver said there are about 100,000 residential users in the United States, and "there is new growth on the horizon."
Others were less sanguine. "The value proposition has not been that compelling" to convince business customers to switch to VoIP, said Anton Anikst, a telecommunications analyst with Morgan Stanley (New York). Anikst added that the venture capitalist funds have also been cool toward the technology. Overall, adoption of VoIP will be "fairly gradual," he added.
Senior Commerce officials like Nancy Victory, head of its National Telecommunications & Information Administration, and Bruce Mehlman, a former Cisco Systems executive, have been promoting VoIP as one way to drive U.S. broadband deployment.
