IP telephony will be the catalyst for a communications market expanded to include video conferencing and web-enabled call centers, and worth over $10bn in Europe alone, according to a report from European telecommunications consultancy Schema Group.
Opportunities for Unified Telecommunications Services: The Convergence of IP, Intelligent Network (IN) and Mobile Technologies argues that traditional telecoms firms will be at an advantage – rather than threatened, as anticipated – from the new technology, as voice lines, despite declining in volume relative to data, still generate the greater revenue.
Robin Duke-Woolley, author of the report, predicts that IP will bring benefits for voice-based virtual private networks (VPN), network-based call centers, and unified messaging, particularly for mobile operators. The European market for network-based call center services is expected to expand from $35m this year to $910m by 2005. This would enable web surfers to click on an icon to access a call center with whom they can make an immediate transaction through a microphone on the PC.
Duke-Woolley said that technology would take time to migrate to the new service, and an interim technology might be audio-voice conferencing. Disparate executives could have a normal telephone conference and access the same information using PSTN for voice and IP for data. Although the technology to do this is available today, says Duke-Woolley, it’s not really going to start taking off for another couple of years.
