Yesterday, I gave a keynote address at the Pacific Telecom Conference (PTC) in Honolulu. I talked about the current state of the IP communications industry and where its going in the future.

The IP communications industry has been around a long time - around 15 years or so. During that time, there are four areas in which it has been extremely successful. The first is in the enterprise. IP-based business phones are nearly half of all new PBX line sales today. The cost savings of consolidating voice and data networks, and the benefits of centralized call control, have made VoIP a clear winner there. The second area of success is in consumer cable. Even though VoIP is invisible to end-users, the cost savings of the triple play has been compelling. In the U.S., 16.5 million homes are using VoIP provided by their cable providers. The third area of success is near and dear to Skype - the consumer desktop application. Skype has over 520 million registered users. In terms of usage, a just-released report by Telegeography said that Skype now accounts for 12% of worldwide ILD traffic - up 50% from last year. Thats amazing growth. The final area of success for IP communications has been voice backhaul.

We’re far from done though. The future holds many opportunities. Three big ones stand out. The first is video, the second is mobile, and the third is web.

The IP communications industry has been talking about video forever, but it’s finally happening. This is due to the increased user expectations (video is now everywhere on the web), the now ubiquitous availability of webcams that are built into laptops and netbooks, and the improvements in video quality we’ve seen - now VGA and 720p. The final barrier had been the network effect - finding others to talk to. Skype has finally jumped the network effect gap. With 34% of Skype-to-Skype calls using video, there is a huge population of folks to have video calls with. This is what is enabling us to now bring Skype to TVs, as we announced last week with LG and Panasonic.

The next frontier is mobile. Mobile VoIP is in its infancy, but a combination of factors is creating a perfect storm for this to change. The first is the rise of the smartphone. 18% of phone sales today are smartphones, a number which will grow to 38% in 2013. WiFi is finally becoming ubiquitous on these devices, allowing high bandwidth in the home and the office - the two most important places. The growth in 3g usage and 4g rollouts are growing available capacity too. Add to that the rise of the app store as a channel for new apps, and you have an amazing opportunity for mobile IP communications apps to flourish.

The final frontier is the web. The lines between IP communications and the web are blurring. Facebook has IM. Social networks are all about person-to-person communications. Advances in web technologies - like AJAX and Flash - are making browser apps as interactive as desktop apps. The browser is now handling multimedia, and standards are evolving to enable codec support right within the browser. This trend will continue, and extend to encompass all of real-time communications.

Voice on the web won’t just be about click-to-call, but rather, seamlessly integrating real-time communications with the web experience itself. Today the web is mostly a solo activity - I browse by myself, and visit eCommerce sites by myself. Imagine being able to have a virtual e-commerce shopping trip with friends, where people can browse through the shelves of Amazon together, all while chatting by voice and seeing each other with video. Imagine being on Facebook and being able to speak to someone about their status update as easily as you can post a reply to that update. That is what it means to bring a voice to the web, and it is the future.

Internet Communications - a Look Ahead