Voice over Internet Protocol (VOIP) business models based on toll-bypass are destined to fail, says Tellumat business development manager Neill Friedman. He believes VOIP should be seen rather as an applications enabler.
Friedman was speaking to ITWeb before the Cape Town launch of Tellumat`s alliance with US VOIP hardware supplier Inter-Tel. The alliance was formed to target the high-end South African corporate user, particularly the contact centre industry, where Tellumat has traditionally been weak.
Friedman defines toll-bypass as when a VOIP service supplier offers to reduce the costs on mainly overseas calls by not using the formal billing structure, which in SA`s case is supplied by Telkom.
"The toll-bypass model is destined to fail. This is because Telkom will always be the biggest and strongest player in the market. It has the ability to keep reducing its overseas and domestic call charges and this erodes the business case for the toll-bypass model."
He says South African corporations have not realised where the actual savings lie in using VOIP technology.
"VOIP is an applications enabler, rather than an application in its own right," Friedman says.
He cites the example of a company with a number of branches around the country, which employs only one switchboard operator at its head office, to route the calls wherever they are needed.
"This means a call originating in Cape Town destined for the Cape Town branch of the company would first go to Johannesburg and then be transferred back to Cape Town on the same line without any interference. This is called 'anti-tromboning`," he says.
Friedman says VOIP allows a whole company to become a virtual contact centre as calls can be routed to people based on certain criteria, such as skills.
"Say none of the sales people are able to take a call. It can be automatically routed to someone else who may have some knowledge of the sales process and so it won`t be lost," he says.
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