Unless cost, reliability and performance issues are solved, Voice over IP (VoIP) is likely to continue remaining out of the grasp of small businesses, according to a Viatel survey.
The research said that 64 per cent of companies believed that converged services such as IP telephony were likely to remain the domain of big enterprise.
Over half (54 per cent) of the sample, which looked at 200 companies with five to 250 employees, had not deployed VoIP, citing a number of reasons.
The top concern (69 per cent) was that there was unreliable call quality when running VoIP over traditional broadband, with 47 per cent having a problem with the high price of leased lines needed to endure reliability.
However, it was interesting to note that 95 per cent of SMBs which did not yet adopt VoIP would like to do so. This showed that if line problems were overcome, VoIP could become much more common for businesses with less money and resources.
"Traditional ADSL simply cannot provide the necessary performance and stability for business-grade VoIP," said Alistair Buck, director of voice at Viatel.
