VoIP could revolutionise the telephone

IP telephony solutions have the potential to change the telephony technology industry more than any other innovation ever has, Heavy Reading has said.

Technologies like VoIP phones have the capability to transform the way phone calls are made and received, according to the independent telecom technology market research organisation.

Heavy Reading's Disruptive VoIP Services: What Carriers Need to Know report found that a lot of telecommunications companies transfer long distance voice calls over internet-based connections.

VoIP solutions have become the standard in business, while smaller enterprises are increasingly using hosted telephony over traditional phone services, the report found.

"Such developments have already made VoIP a mainstream communication technology," said Robert Poe, analyst at large at Heavy Reading and author of the report.

Mr Poe predicts that VoIP will increasingly disrupt established telephony technologies as it goes from simply emulating them to offering new kinds of services.

Big businesses worldwide are wasting £12 billion a year by failing to deploy their telecom services efficiently, Hudson & Yorke found recently.

Firms should engage with specialists, such as a VoIP provider, in order to lower their costs and improve their service, the telecommunications and network consultancy recommended.