Ken Paker, TDS VP, has some interesting thoughts about the future of voice services. Basically, he argues that, in the future, most end users will have multiple voice providers.
Maybe one provider supplies what we now think of as “fixed line voice.” Perhaps another supplies mobile voice, while others provide PC voice, or voice within the context of Internet applications.
Incidentally, Kevin McGuire of NTCA agrees with that view. “We aren’t shackled by the constraints of working within the ILEC territory,” he says.
As CLEC operations have been created to serve customers outside a traditional territory, so over-the-top, cloud-based applications increasingly are possible as well.