is VoIP ready for primetime?

Once you go VoIP you’ll (probably) never go back … at least that’s what companies like Skype and Vonage hope. A mere 5 years after a gaggle of AT&T wanna-be’s started turning idle bandwidth into gold by promoting it’s use to transmit voice signals, the voice-over-internet-protocol (VoIP) train may have arrived at the station for conservative businesses such as law firms. Take a look at this piece for instance: Legal Technology – When to Go VoIP? The implication is that VoIP can be deployed in a business environment, but ought to be used via conventional and familiar, if reliable, sources such as Ma Bell (or what’s left of her). The article may signal once and for all as to whether VoIP can be employed without sacrificing the advantages of a conventional phone system, but it begs the question of whether you’re still getting a bang for your buck when the service is delivered from the same people who gouged you raw in the first place — your friendly telephone monopoly. My answer? A simple ‘no.’ No, you’re not going to get true VoIP value from AT&T that you could if you were to get the service from an AT&T competitor. Why? Because AT&T offering VoIP is like GM offering to sell you a Kia. It should take about 3 seconds for them to try to upsell you to a Cadillac … or in this case a super-expensive PBX system with about two dozen features that you don’t need, never heard of, couldn’t care less about, and without which you’d be much better off. But I guess you can’t blame the phone companies for using the same coercive, hard-sell tactics that have worked for them in the past. Hey, if it ain’t broke …