Cisco Subnet, a blog on the NetworkWorld.com site, is talking about how VoIP is no longer a hot technology, blaming cable companies that bundled TV, Internet, and telephone service but then didn’t differentiate the VoIP based telephone offerings from the more traditional competitors, equipment makers licencing structurers were too onerous for the quality they delivered, and VoIP start-ups were doomed because of a “general lack of decent broadband access.” The blog post, entitled “Is VoIP Dead?” links to Ted Wallingford’s VoIP based blog “Signal to Noise,” as well, where he makes a decent point:

VoIP companies offering really cool features should’ve made deals to make those features a part of pure-play companies’ service.  This would’ve compelled adoption and brought both types of companies closer to the black. Instead, we saw no joint ventures between pureplays like BroadVoice and “oh that’s neat” players like TalkPlus.   The result–VoIP pure plays were no different from the bundled phone service provided by cablecos and telcos, and the public couldn’t see what the big deal about VoIP was.

It’s true. New applications and services which VoIP was supposed to enable are coming out very, very slowly, and that there were a lot of wasted opportunities that boils down to a mindset that “VoIP = Telephones.”

VoIP is to the telephone what the computer is to the typewriter. But no one’s really come out with the applications and the infrastructure yet.

But just because VoIP hasn’t lived up to its potential (through no fault of the technology’s own) and has become “yet another commoditized service” does not mean that it isn’t important – even if it’s “only a phone,” the phones still need to work. And so long as VoIP exists on the same lines as data, there’s going to be a need for people who can manage the network – though Wallingford goes further and points out that VoIP today is no longer a specialists’ skill – that the average network engineer needs to know enough about how VoIP behaves, otherwise they really can’t be called network engineers.

For all this, I just can’t see the death of VoIP. Yes, it’s not as “hot” as it was a few years ago, but even in the worst case scenario, no one is ripping out their VoIP implementations to put in new POTS services. VoIP is becoming a mature technology. This is a good thing – this is what we want to happen. We want ubiquitous, commoditized VoIP because when standards are established, this is when innovation and new applications become easier to implement.

It’s not dead. It’s just pining for the fjords.