No Surprise-Comcast Topping Business VoIP Market-But Is All Business VoIP Created Equal

Comcast Center, the headquarters of Comcast – nearly completed, photographed 3/14/08 Español: Comcast Center, la sede del Comcast (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

While many in the business of business telecom may be surprised to see Infonetics Research reporting that Comcast, along with Verizon, are topping the list of business VoIP deployments, I'm not at all. You see, back when Comcast purchased NGT, in what was really a mercy take over as Comcast already held a significant portion of the company, I felt that the Philadelphia based cable giant was positioning to be big in voice, including out of their own market, and back in March I penned that cable companies are your next telco.

Well the Diane Myers led research at Infonetics seems to prove this out. The announcement also highligthed 8×8, West (which acquired Smoothstone), Bandwidth.com amongst others.

But all business VoIP is not created equal. For example, one point that is not detailed in the news release is the differene between traffic carried over a public network and a private network that's managed. Just recently Skype dropped the pure "open" super node concept and took the first step of managed calling, by adding their own server environment. In essence Skype is now emulating one giant phone company, for free, on the public Internet. Translated, Skype just became a true competitor to Vonage and even MagicJack, but with an existing number of users/customers. 

For most businesses, calls going over the public internet don't really matter. But if privacy, security and control are for you, then asking the question about public vs. managed Internet will be a deciding factor on which carrier you choose.