Count Martyn Davies, telecom consultant at the wonderfully-named Weird Crater, among those who think that ending traditional telephony is all that VoIP will accomplish: “The next big shift will be to mobile.”

In remarks reported in ihotdesk, a British industry journal, Davies seemingly accepts it as a foregone conclusion that of course VoIP will render traditional telephony irrelevant. After that, though, he sees mobility apps on smart phones “and ultimately LTE (News - Alert) (Long Term Evolution)” making all mobile calls VoIP calls, and the traditional circuit switching currently found on smart phones will be museum pieces.

VoIP certainly has been a success so far, as ihotdesk notes a recent study conducted in the United States which showed that usage has grown from nine million in 2009 to around 29 million today, and satisfaction rates “stand at 98 per cent.”

The surge in mobile VoIP Davies speaks of was underlined earlier this month, when TMC (News - Alert) noted that according to recent research from In-Stat (News - Alert), active mobile VoIP subscriber rates were seen to triple to the estimated 29 million figure in 2011 due to “increased smartphone penetration and a growing breadth of offerings,” as well as a greater number of providers introducing services, “including a growing handful of mobile operators that are beginning to embrace, to some degree, mobile VoIP.”

It’s hard to argue the economics of VoIP, particularly mobile VoIP, but there are issues that need to be addressed if people are going to willingly give up their good ol’ reliable telephony, including reliability. How often does your Internet go out compared with your phone line? If all your telephony relies on your Internet connection, does that give you a level of reliability you’re comfortable with?

And whereas customer (dis)satisfaction, particularly with call quality, has been a thorn in the side of VoIP, TMC’s Beecher Tuttle recently reported notable improvements on that front, finding that Palo Alto (News - Alert)-based Ooma introduced a new cordless handset that provides call clarity and smartphone features and, “when coupled with the company's Ooma Telo system,” the cordless Ooma HD2 Handset “is able to capture twice the voice data to double the fidelity of standard phone calls.”  

Also, Ooma offers a mobile app which costs $9.99 and delivers twice the fidelity of standard phone calls -- for a richer, more natural sounding conversation between Ooma customers.  

As Davies said, such growth feeds on itself and will only serve to strengthen the entire mobile VoIP market: “A strong innovator market is good for software and hardware vendors, good for telco competition and benefits the end-user.”