Mark Evans

Rick Segal sent me a blog posting (License to Roma) about how BT was handing out free headsets in London's Waterloo station to promote its BT Communicator service. It got me thinking about telecom carriers are going to market VoIP in 2006 now the technology has really moved into the mainstream. Obviously, the big challenge facing carriers is selling a service that will cannibalize their high-margin local phone service. Some carriers such as BT (click here for a Red Herring story on the carrier's approach to VoIP) will accept the new technology landscape and aggressively move forward to embrance VoIP rather than letting rivals such as Vonage and cablecos steal the business. Others, meanwhile, will continue to bury their heads in the sand and hope VoIP's adoption slows down over concerns about quality and security. In Canada, it's hard not to get the feeling the carriers haven't quite decided how they want to move forward with VoIP. Telus, for example, hasn't even rolled out a VoIP service - probably because Shaw's $55-a-month cable telephony plan hasn't taken the market by storm. Telus promises, however, it will launch a residential service next year. Do not be surprised to see Telus take the same conservative approach as Bell by coming out with a service with prices that fall solidly between Vonage and Shaw. In other words, it will likely be expensive enough to prevent a wave of existing local customers by moving to VoIP, but not too dear to deter early adopters. That said, the carriers can be conservative because the cablecos - with the exception of Videotron - have also been pragmatic. Rogers, for example, is just starting to aggressively push its cable telephony service now that it's convinced most of the kinks have been worked out. Shaw hasn't come off its $55 price point, and hoping to discourage people from using VoIP by offering $10 QoS service to ensure rival VoIP services such as Vonage work well. Meanwhile, Videotron continues to charge ahead - 100K customers and counting - with its low-price cable telephony service. So what's in store for 2006? I think the carriers and the cablecos will become more aggressive in terms of marketing and pricing as they ramp up their battle for lucrative triple and quadruple-play customers. Someone, of course, has to blink first before things can really get exciting but there is lot at stake as VoIP gathers momentum. For a snapshot of Canada's VoIP pricing environment, here's a post I did earlier this year.

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