Michael Khalilian

October 14, 2005

Mike Khalilian is the chairman of the IPCC, the group that has partnered with Internet Telephony Magazine to award the VoIP Service Provider Awards in a week or so in LA at ITEXPO. I bring this up because Mike was just quoted in this article about how CLECs need to immediately embrace VoIP.

Excerpt:

So Khalilian wants to emphasize to the CLEC community that VoIP does indeed work, and that the technology costs for VoIP are below $100 per subscriber. That number was inflated only because of the large amount of money pioneering VoIP service providers spent advertising through major media outlets, he says. “Some of our friends spent over $100 million in the last couple years” on marketing, he adds. “But if Vonage didn’t educate the [market], half of these vendors wouldn’t be here.”

Khalilian hopes that by spreading those messages, competitive carriers will reach a comfort level with VoIP. “As the service providers slow down,” he says, “they’re going to hurt themselves.”

The need to spread that message has forced IPCC to evolve from a protocols and standards organization to a technical marketing organization charged with pushing VoIP forward. IPCC at CompTel last month held an E911 working group meeting, as well as a handful of sessions to get its message out.

“We need to just clean up our message,” he says, and convince the CLECs not to rely on reselling somebody else’s service on the traditional network. The current path most CLECs are taking, he says, simply positions them as an extension of the RBOC sales force.

There are some good points here that successful CLECs will have to listen to.

Michael Khalilian

Communications and Technology Blog - Tehrani.com

Michael Khalilian