Vint Cerf hears VoIP calling
If consumers begin adopting VoIP, who's going to use a phone company, whether it's a Bell or a long-distance company?

It depends a lot on what traditional services you have to offer. These things become very commodity in nature. Long distance has gone that way, but it's less so for local service because there's only a modest amount of competition. The way you eventually have to make money is by adding value to the traffic, which means adding new services. That will be how you survive in this game, by adding value. If you want to be a purely commodity business and can survive, more power to you. My reaction is I want to do something better.

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Too much has happened in the last several years and too many crystal balls have proved wanting. But when it comes to forecasting the adoption of voice over IP, the veteran computer scientist has no such reluctance to qualify this as one of the next big things to affect the technology firmament.

Cerf, nowadays the senior vice president of Internet Architecture and Technology for MCI, says that traditional telecommunications carriers are finally taking VoIP seriously. Indeed, Cerf, who created the TCP/IP protocol that defines online communication now spends a good part of his time focused on VoIP, the cheaper form of telephony, expecting it to permanently alter the telephone industry.

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