BT reports millionth VoIP subscriber

BT has signed up more than one million customers for its VoIP services, the company announced.

In a statement, the telecoms company said it had reached its target six months ahead of schedule. Gavin Patterson, managing director of consumer at BT Retail said the achievement was "nothing short of spectacular".

"UK consumers are clearly happy to embrace internet telephony when it is straightforward to use and offers great value, and through BT Total Broadband our customers are getting all the benefits that broadband has to offer," he said.

A spokesman for BT said the success of the service comes from hardware that makes it as easy to make a call from a VoIP phone as from a normal phone. He also said that a similar picture is emerging in business uptake of VoIP.

"When it's easy to call using VoIP as a normal landline phone and it is cheaper, then the case for both business and consumer becomes compelling," he said.

Companies are beginning to embrace VoIP as an aternative to traditional POTS. A survey carried out by research company Vanson Bourne found that 69 per cent of companies saw free intra-company calls as the main benefit of a VoIP system.

But other research from Continental Research found that the use of VoIP made very little impact on fixed line usage with only one per cent of users indicating that only three per cent of users had stopped using fixed line telephony completely.

Experts said that VoIP systems can deliver over 30 per cent savings a year as well as providing additional efficiencies through numerous workflow benefits.

"VoIP in the business world is greatly misunderstood. Part of this misconception is coming from free internet telephony systems such as Skype. Skype is not a professional or corporate VoIP system," said Scott Nursten, managing director of network consulting and implementation company s2s.

"There is a wealth of difference between a unified communications system and free internet telephony. Companies are in danger of putting their professional image on the line, if they confuse the two," he said.

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