Telecom Conventional Wisdom Often is Wrong

 In the global telecom business, conventional wisdom” sometimes is quite wrong. SIP trunking, hosted IP telephony and VoIP provide examples. The conventional wisdom is that SIP trunking saves end users money, that hosted IP telephony is a bigger business than Centrex was, or that VoIP is a business tier-one telcos “need” to aggressively pursue. But all three might be “wrong.”


The point is that business strategy and activities have to be based on correct assumptions, and that many common assumptions are incorrect. Consider the conventional wisdom that SIP trunks save businesses money when used to support IP telephony traffic. But there now are arguments that this might not always be true.


Depending on whose research you look at, the penetration rate of SIP trunking in the US is somewhere between five percent and 30 percent of all trunk lines. Zeus Kerravala estimates penetration is right around five percent in the United States, with Europe being about half of that and adoption being almost non existent in Asia at the moment.


The reason, some would argue, is that SIP trunking does not always save enterprises money, especially if the traffic mix changes to video telephony, or when enterprises own lots of distributed phone systems that are not fully depreciated.