“The market is still in its infancy. VoIP services currently
generate about $100 million in annual revenue in the United States
last year, but a market analysis by Frost and Sullivan project that
market grow to $2 billion by the end of next year. After that, who
knows….”
“The reason that any of this matters to the Open Source and
Linux communities is that this future network almost has to be both
open, and Unix-, if not Linux-based.”
“It is critical to telecommunications providers that they be
able to inter-operate their set of services with other operators
around the world. In the old days of proprietary systems, adding
even the most basic services to telecom systems took forever.
Services like call waiting and call forwarding took years to
implement as carriers held onto proprietary technologies and fought
over standards. In today’s Internet-meets-voice environment, there
is no time for such nonsense.”