MultiChannel News, which is the bible for the cable industry when it comes to news and insight has a very exhaustive and insightful story today on all the things happening in VoIP within the cable industry.
What is obvious to me is there is a lot more that the MSO’s realize about what they need to do with VoIP. The thing is, what they are talking about is “their” VoIP or Digital Voice, not other’s VoIP. This has to spell trouble for Vonage and some of the smaller players like Packet8, VoicePulse, BroadVoice, etc. unless they can cut their own deals.
On the otherhand, for the soon to be SBC/AT&T CallVantage this has to be very good news as AT&T supplies a ton of network service and transport to the MSOs nationwide and of course there is always SBC, now bolstered the FCC decision on DSL providers access.
The story highlights the importance of SIP, the future opportunities in home alarm systems (that has to be good for Alarms.com and Next Alarm) as well as one reason why IDT wants to bring Net2Phone back under one roof. Oh, and after reading the article, one has to realize that cable is a global business. Wait until VoIP says hello to John Malone of Liberty Media.
And you wonder why Murdoch was interested in Skype?