VoIP as investment security?

The fear for many African businesses is that the phone system they purchase won’t turn out to be an abandoned “closed” system that can’t be upgraded.

According to an article in Africa IT News, VoIP systems are being viewed as ‘investment protection’ for their telephony systems.

“These are highly valid considerations,”  Rob Lith, Director of Connection Telecom, is quoted in the article, adding “and quite frankly, they’re the result of two things – the opaque business practices prevalent in the bad old days of monolithic telcos, and the non-standard technology of the powerful ‘legacy’ tech vendors of yesteryear.”

According to the article, many of the old-fashioned phone companies in Africa started building in closed-system engineering in response to VoIP technology.

This enables the companies to raise costs because of the specialized knowledge needed to manage such systems, according to the article.