Desk Phones and Other Legacy Services

“The deskphone market has been left for dead by many but there is still room in the space for the device to evolve and become become a more integral part of your UC strategy,” writes TMC’s CEO, Rich Tehrani. The thing is: they will need to change drastically to do that. It is still pretty much the same device that we had 20 years ago. It is still the equivalent to the original brick of a cell phone.

With less than 25% of businesses on VoIP according to TechNova Consulting, then there is still time to make them relevant again.

Meanwhile Verizon is asking the FCC for permission to shutter more legacy SS7 voice switches. The TDM to IP transition is marching on. Frame Relay and ATM are mothballed. Soon SS7 as we are used to will be. I wonder if 9-1-1 centers have caught up yet?

AT&T told the FCC that “AT&T is progressing with its TDM-to-IP voice service transition in two cities in Florida and Alabama, telling the FCC that on a combined basis 50% of total customer accounts have voluntarily migrated to one of the telco’s next-gen wireline and wireless voice services.” [source]

OTT communications is growing so wide that it is now being reported on by analysts! “The VoIP market (e.g., Microsoft Skype), the IP messaging market (e.g., WhatsApp), a portion of the social networking advertising market (e.g., Facebook), Unified Communications (e.g., Cisco) and Cloud communications markets (e.g., Twillio) make up the OTT communication market.” [source]

Broadsoft has 38% of the global UC market with 15 million UC lines, but that isn’t a significant portion of the global business voice market. The analysts have now estimated CAGR in UCaaS at just 10% (down from the 20+% they were cheerleading for a few years ago).

Riddle me this: If the IP transition is going so well, how is the growth so slow (<10%) and the market penetration so small (15M = 38% or <25% of biz) when there are so many VoIP Providers out there?