One of the things that striked me at the evening panel (as titled above) was that several panelists mentioned that 10 years ago, numerous (AT&T lab) engineers told them VoIP was not possible at all. Reasons cited inclued needing a lot of CPU power, lack of bandwidth, poor sound quality etc etc. But wala, here we are today at VON where VoIP is changing the industry.
Hence, “all engineers are blind”. Blind not because we dont know anything but because we know too much. We know too much to focus only on why the “crazy” idea won’t work because (1), .. (2), .. but failed to see when those doesn’t matter. Does quality of the voice matters? Yes but only up to a point. But no, engineers wants nothing but perfection so nay, VoIP can never make it.
Another thing that striked me is Robert comment that a survey shows people used less then 24mins of their landline per day whereas they spend more then 4hrs on tv or internet. And so we have this wonderful 99.999% uptime phone which we build and maintained for so many years and continue to pay for it till now and we not using it for more then 23hrs per day? Perhaps with VoIP, we can stop the concept of hanging up the phone – I mean, I dont hanging up my skype session anymore.
