March - 2004 issue > Feature VOYP HYPE

By Pradeep Shankar & Robin Mathews

Some time in the not-too-distant future, you are sitting at home playing your favorite game on your X-box when an intruder breaks in. It is a particularly inconvenient moment because you are really close to breaking your previous high score. So you dial 911 on your X-Box and continue with the game, while the police arrive and do the needful.

You might even find it amusing that there used to be a time when such an idea would have seemed fantastic.

But such a scenario will soon become quite real. And this is thanks to Voice over Internet Protocol—or VoIP—a technology that is already redefining the way people communicate.

Today a U.S. soldier stationed in Seoul can set up service with unlimited in-bound calls that are local to the caller from home. An Indian student at the University of South Carolina can also avail of the same facility. Or consider the traveling executive who can just carry his IP phone with him wherever he goes and plug it into the broadband connection that more and more hotels now provide. Not only can his family call him on the local number, he can also use the out-bound service to make calls from his hotel room.

Penetration of broadband connections in the U.S. residential market—now approaching 20 percent and likely to hit 30 percent in 2004—is undoubtedly on an upswing. This rapid increase is indicative of the opportunity in the VoIP space. New Millennium Research Council, a telecom think tank in Washington, D.C, predicts that VoIP could account for as much as 40 percent of the consumer telephone market by 2009.

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