The VOIP vortex

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EL TAWIL: The financial crisis has definitely hit the Middle East but our operations in the region are still intact.

Voice over IP (VoIP) has been pushed as a solution to enterprise telephony for nearly a decade now, yet the fixed-line telephone market is still going strong. Nathan Statz reports on the intricate world of VoIP in the Middle East.

Transmitting the sound of your voice along a copper wire is something that is generally trusted – countless generations have grown up alongside the technology and it has followed them into the business world.

The same could not be said when Alexander Graham Bell first commercialised the telephone and had many pundits dismissing it as some sort of hocus-pocus.

Similar reactions of disbelief greeted Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) providers when they tried to convince CIOs to buy into the technology, though the head-shaking was aimed more at the startup costs rather than any accusations of magic.

Much time has passed since those first impressions were formed and the technology has matured along the way. Many organisations now trust the lifeblood of their communication strategies to VoIP infrastructure and constantly pump voice packets over IP connections.

There are still quite a large number of CIOs out there who are not interested in making the switch, particularly those who have had years of reliable service from their copper-based landline telephones. Some of the companies that are firmly entrenched in the traditional camp reside in the Middle East – which presents a special case when it comes to VoIP.

This is mainly because several countries in the region regulate the technology and have passed legislation to outlaw overseas VoIP calls. This has given rise to a grey area where countries will allow IP telephony – or IP phones as they are commonly known – to be installed and used domestically, but the actual calls are routed through existing copper lines internationally.

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