Over the top VoIP services gained momentum in the United States and other countries during the early years of the last decade when broadband internet came to life. Earlier in 1999, the introduction of Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) specification RFC 2543 marked the beginning of VoIP’s journey and a new era in voice communication hence began. Since then, with the advent of companies like Skype and Vonage, VoIP has grown rapidly to receive widespread adoption across the world.

Cullen Jennings, Distinguished Engineer, Office of CTO at Cisco speaks during the recently held eComm conference about the major trends that may affect unified communications in the future. Cullen analyses the major expenses incurred in offering over-the-top audio and video services and how they shaped up during the last decade. As hardware costs have been driven down by mass production of everything from LCDs to flash drives, software costs have followed a different trend with proprietary wideband audio and video codecs getting costlier every day. Google’s acquisition of Gizmo and Skype’s acquisition of Camino Networks earlier are primarily to take possession of several such expensive codecs.

Besides VoIP providers, the cost of these codecs is a major impediment for open source communities like Mozilla to take them to use. As the open source browsers and VoIP providers allow free downloads of their software, paying royalty for codecs used in those software can make millions of such free downloads financially unviable for them. Cullen hence talks about the possibility of developing royalty free codecs and their possible implications for the growth html browsers in the future. Cullen also discusses Skype’s P2P platform and how it has delivered exceptional results at a time when the focus has already moved onto Cloud Computing.