What does the future in interconnect voice look like?

What will interconnect voice look like in 3, 5, or even 10 years? Will it all go away? Will all calls be free? Will voice carriers even exist?

These are deep questions, profound questions, and from our perspective, silly questions. Of course interconnect voice will be here in 3, 5, and 10 years. How do we know this? Why are we so confident in this prediction? Simple. Because as long as a voice call correlates to something of value, then people, businesses, and governments will be willing to pay some amount to ensure the that the call will go through and not be interrupted. In other words, people will pay for quality.

Sure, the advent of what’s app and the explosion in the availability of bandwidth makes OTT based services attractive and “free”. But by being free, the value placed on delivering the calls, completing them, and having them be of high quality, is lessened because there is no economic driver that directly correlates to delivering high quality experiences.

Sure, those companies are selling your data, and if they deliver poor service maybe you stop using them, therefore, their revenues and profits are impacted. However, because there is no direct correlation between every phone call and dollar of revenue, those companies have a challenge at rationalizing investment in infrastructure and technology and resources to improve the quality and experience of the phone call. But carriers are different. They do correlate their revenue and profit to voice calls and do want to deliver quality, but that costs money. Which means they have to charge their users. So, in the end, “No” the industry is not going away in 5 years or 10 years. In fact, we believe this industry is here to stay. There is going to continue to be consolidation and disruption in the industry, that is a given. But in 2029, there will still be voice calls that people pay for because voice is the only synchronous based communication that people expect to work flawlessly.