India Broadband Forum

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New technologies have always had their naysayers and VoIP is no exception. It's the target of a lot of misconceptions, and it'll take some time before consumers understand as well as they do regular phone systems.
Some people have actually openly stated, in comments on websites, that VoIP is a passing fad and that it'll go away. There is also a perceived jealousy towards VoIP from the perspective of old school telecom, which be a motive for bringing down recently-IPO'd Vonage (NYSE: VG). Bring down the stock price, then either buy them out or bury them. However, there is no way VoIP is going away. Vonage was just unfortunate to the first VoIP provider to become a publicly traded company.
Unfortunately, the criminal element will always find a way to abuse technology. But this pair strikes me as very odd. Two American men were recently charged with telecom fraud after they re-routed about a half-million VoIP calls through at least 15 VoIP providers' routers, around the world. The descriptions I've read about how these guys did it made me wonder just one thing: what were they thinking?
It appears that these guys had to have the brains to pull off what they did. It took a fair bit of technical skill and networking knowledge to reroute their customers' calls through other providers services. The technical description of their activity proves that.
But it's such a shame that they employed their obvious skills in such a manner. Instead, had they just thought a little bit more about the situation, instead of committing fraud, they could very likely have turned their knowledge into VoIP security consulting and made a nice living. And they would have stayed out of jail and not given VoIP publicity a black eye. A missed opportunity for sure.