Host: Well, we are talking about Voice Over IP telephone. And once again, we have Dave Hunter, I say an expert in the field. Will that be much too much saying you’re an expert? You are an expert.
Dave Hunter: Well, I am not sure that I’d qualify as an expert but I certainly know a fair bit about VoIP.
Host: Absolutely and we’re going to take a look at a service that we actually use called One Connect. I’m certainly interested in what is happening with Voice Over IP market wide in Canada. Obviously, it’s kind of been in an early adapters face for some time now. Is it starting to become main stream, where are we with that?
Dave Hunter: You know I’d say that’s a good characterization of where we are. A lot of the early doctors have now gone back to the traditional type of telephone lines simply because their reliability and support aren’t there yet.
Host: Well, that’s one of the things that we hear about like people who I talk to who use VoIP and the women have problems in our office. They would know it’s VoIP and then they complain about it all the time, you know. No one ever complains about their cellphone when they drop a call, they just call again. You know but with VoIP, it’s always like, “Oh, they’re stupid VoIP phones.” And they think they should be on landline. Is that kind of true?
Dave Hunter: Well, it’s very true because you actually have something to compare with when you’re talking about VoIP in the old or traditional way of communicating whereas with cellphones, you really, to compare it, you actually didn’t have anything or you had in a very sparsely place towers which meant that you had drop or more drop calls as you were driving.
Host: Right, so why does a business look at Voice Over IP to replace its hard line telephones as a solution? Why would they do it, a small business?
Dave Hunter: I think most small businesses that are choosing to go to VoIP to reduce their telephone costs.
Host: That’s the reason and I like it.
Dave Hunter: And you know rather than looking at performance or productivity games that they can leverage with the technology, I mean for example, you can have a stand alone telephone and be able to take this anywhere that you wish and plug it in and use it as your telephone device.
Host: Right, I want to work from home for the day. I literally take this phone, plug it into my internet connective router at my home. And if somebody calls me whether they’re my customer across the country or whatever, the phone rings, they don’t know I’m not on my office, I pick it up, there I am. So, I have that, that’s really cool.
Dave Hunter: Well, it is and because in Canada we do get a lot of snowstorms for those employees that can’t make it in to the office, they can certainly choose to work from home if they have this type of a phone. And then no one knows when they call that they’re actually not in the office.
Host: So, for the most part, this is a handset just like any other phone. You pick it up, get dial tone and you dial your numbers, you know, long distance all the rest of it. It’s a phone but really there are kind of cool things that you can with Voice Over IP depending on what service you signed up to is you can actually get rid of the handset completely and neither way about taking this home with you or on your business trips because the whole thing can be done with your workstation or your laptop.
Dave Hunter: Sure and we’re moving to more of a converged desktop model where we actually move in the phone into the laptop even Microsoft is coming up later this year by the Pronic that they will offer built-in telephones into its operating system like bringing platform.
Host: Built into it, right, still getting into the game.
Dave Hunter: Sure. Now, we’ve gone from being able to use the old style of headsets on your head and to the small travelers dial headsets to know incorporating bluetooth into the new laptops from being able to use the same device you use with your cellphone and communicate with it in your laptop.
Host: Well, this is where things get really interesting because you have the ability to—everyone knows this, everyone is used to it. They use it to talk in their cellphone but you get into the office and you can literally pair that now with your computer like you say laptops either have or desktops either have built in bluetooth in them or you get these little connectors and now you can carry that conversation on through the computer.
Dave Hunter: This is all about mobility and actually being able to allow the user to choose to communicate with whichever device at whatever time that they want to and allow them to actually have a single platform I suppose to having to have two different devices to communicate to their end users.
Host: So, let’s go back to quality so it’s cheaper, fantastic, great option for business, lots of features, we can be on handsets, we can be on laptops, we can be in mobile. There is like lots of technology but the quality like is that going to change like is VoIP just playing in a suck or is it going to get better?
Dave Hunter: Well, depending upon the carrier that you choose to handle our carrier VoIP and depending on the handset that you choose, you know, most importantly the most crucial or critical aspect of VoIP is your internet access whether it’s dedicated or whether you’re using the public internet access, it will depend upon your experience with VoIP.
Host: Okay and one last thing, I see you brought a little camera here that is pretty cool. Everyone knows these webcams on their MSN messenger. They can have little video conversations. Let’s go on the VoIP there.
Dave Hunter: It’s built into the one connect platform so that if you want to have a conference call at the same time you’re talking at the person as long as they have the same sort of camera, the same software that they can actually see you and you can see them in its streaming video.
Host: So, it’s just another benefit to going with the technology like Voice Over IP now when we have our business conversation or even our next interview, we can literally do it through this little computer.
Dave Hunter: That’s true, get fully featured and at a lower cost.
Host: That’s pretty cool. One last thing at Voice Over IP are the big guys going to get into it or the Telesis, the Bell Canada’s, you know, the cable providers—are they going to start offering a service that’s really—I mean they already are but are they going to start to get competitive with some of these guys?
Dave Hunter: I think we’re going to see more movement this year. This year RTC has held the major carriers off until they’ve lost a certain amount of market share that magic numbers 25%. And I think some of the carriers are I find that they are losing market share but they’re not quite down to that number so I think we might see this here. We can see having to step in and maybe make that happen sooner than later.
Host: Very interesting. I looked at Voice Over IP as a technology that your small business might be able to take advantage of, lower cost, lots of fun little things you can do with it, quality you get in there. Thanks so much for joining us.
Dave Hunter: Thank you.
Host: Alright.
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