Who Killed the VoIP Revolution?

"VoIP is dead," Skype General Manager for Voice and Video Jonathan Christensen declared at an industry conference a few weeks ago. He spoke figuratively, of course, but he may well have been right. While proponents of Voice over Internet Protocol had long promised a decade of creative destruction, they themselves appear to have become the victims.

The full potential of a technology is not always realized once it converges with market forces. In this case, the gravitational pull of the incumbent local exchange carriers (ILECs) has always proved difficult to resist. Most of the VoIP industry, while loudly proclaiming the "session-initiation protocol" SIP era as the beginning of the end for monopoly communications, secretly courted the incumbents in hopes of profiting from replacing their long-amortized investments in the fixed-line business. By tying their fortunes to the whimsy of the ILECs, many of the upstarts suffered, destroying billions of dollars in shareholder value in the process.

Recently, PulverMedia, which spurred the VoIP crowd and rode its financial crest, shut its doors amid a swirl of controversy. As of this writing, Sonus Networks (SONS), once a highflier trading at 95 a share in 2000, goes for about 2.29. Even Cisco (CSCO) has thrown in the towel, discontinuing its BTS series of softswitches, which provide the routing logic for VoIP networks. These dismal stories perfectly mirror the ride of the VoIP industry in general.

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