IP telephony cuts both ways

In many of my previous Voice over IP tips, I've stressed the many ways in which organizations can save money by switching from conventional telephony to its IP counterpart. This lesson is not unknown to many companies, and is starting to show some interesting impacts on our marketplace. Cheap (or no) long distance charges seem bound to accelerate offshoring, because IP telephones can reduce (or remove) the long distance charges associated with setting up offshore operations that must be readily accessible to onshore customers.

In fact, there are entire classes of business that IP telephony may help to move offshore. These include the following:

Although carriers and content filtering services can come up with ways of dealing with so-called SPIT (spam over Internet technology), which is typically generated automatically, it's much more difficult to deal with calls from companies using IP telephony outside the US

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. I suspect we'll see the development of blacklist screening technologies for both country codes and originating phone numbers along with whitelists to enable individuals or organizations to create exceptions to otherwise blocked access attempts. So if you are company interested in legitimate offshoring, expect to deal with these obstacles in the near future.

One thing's crystal clear: low costs for IP phone service and low hourly rates paid to phone workers will create market opportunities outside our borders that many of us may come to dread.

Ed Tittel is a regular contributor to numerous TechTarget Web sites, and the author of over 100 books on a wide range of computing subjects from markup languages to information security. He's also a contributing editor for Certification Magazine, and edits Que Publishing's Exam Cram 2 and Training Guide series of cert prep books. E-mail Ed at etittel@techtarget.com.