With VoIP business phone service steadily taking over at companies of all sizes and at all sorts of government agencies, from the smallest localities to the federal government, hardly a day goes by that the announcement of yet another conversion to VoIP crosses my desk. Indeed there are so many of them that I can’t write, or even read, about 99.999% of those that come my way.

But this past week one such missive did catch my eye. It seems that the U.S. Army’s Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, has decided to convert to VoIP.  Fort Leonard Wood is where I did my Army basic training, so any mention of the place (which many of we veterans to this day call ‘Fort Lost In The Woods’) brings back memories. I won’t say all of those memories are pleasant, but some of the things that they taught me there did keep me alive in combat, through two wars.

The government is spending $14.1 million to put in the VoIP system at Leonard Wood, which at first will be equipped with 25,000 ‘right to use’ (RTU) licenses – i.e. up to 25,000 VoIP phones or other digital and IP devices on the network. The system is being built with the ability to expand to 36,000 RTUs if needed. At the same time, the government is decommissioning an old Nortel SL100 PBX – part of a family of non-VoIP PBXes based on technology first introduced in 1975, although much evolved since then. Replacing it is an Avaya Communication Manager 6 (CM6) unified communications system, being installed by Alcatel-Lucent subsidiary LGS Innovations.

But the technicalities of the exact hardware involved isn’t the real news, although LGS and Avaya would love it to be. The point is that a key U.S. Army base, designated ones of the Army’s Centers of Excellence, where 85,000 to 95,000 military (and civilians) are trained each year, is entrusting its communications to VoIP.

That implies confidence in a level of service and security for VoIP that should reassure any business, from the smallest one-man operation on up, that choosing VoIP business phone service is a rational decision which has come of age. And interestingly, looking over the array of VoIP-based services being promised to the military at Leonard Wood, the list bears a striking resemblance to the list of features available from Phone.com to even the smallest business.

Last week I interviewed the president of a firm that specializes in consulting for the cable TV industry, reviewing the message he was to deliver as the lead-off speaker at a cable industry convention. The message he had to deliver was startling.

Basically, it was that the future of that industry isn’t in content – TV shows, if you will – but rather in building the biggest and fastest and best broadband network possible. Put all your effort into putting more optical fiber into the ground was his message. Earn your living primarily by selling capacity on the broadband pipe, not from trying to sell content.

While his missive was aimed at the cable TV industry, it also has reverberations – positive reverberations – for the VoIP industry. The reason should be obvious: the better the broadband available to VoIP users, the better the VoIP phone service that providers such as Phone.com can provide.

The message to the cable industry will also echo through the traditional telephone industry, since what we’re talking about here is good old competition. After all, if cable companies are evolving to be primarily broadband carriers, telephone companies are also moving in exactly the same direction as they lose more and more traditional phone users to Internet-based phone service, and businesses increasingly opt for the economies represented not only by lower phone bills, but also by the savings from virtual PBXes and other VoIP business phone services.

In the end, both industries will look pretty much the same, providing the pipe over which VoIP is carried along with video content and data. The fact that phone carriers tend to use DSL technology, and cable companies use DOCSIS to deliver broadband, is irrelevant to VoIP, since VoIP can work over any pipe that supports IP.

Hopefully, as the competition continues between the cable and phone companies to provide broadband, the competition will also stress better network quality of service. That’s a tricky sell to the consumer market, though, since it takes some technical knowledge beyond simply bragging about how fast service is. Indeed for VoIP, the speed race isn’t all that relevant, since VoIP uses fairly little bandwidth, but business VoIP users should be cognizant of the technical aspects of the service they are buying. Indeed, larger businesses often get service that comes with a guaranteed level of quality of service, a promise from their carrier that ensures the stability of their business VoIP service … or the carrier pays a penalty.

As a very small business I don’t get such guarantees, and looking at my quality of service, from Century Link, for the past month shows there’s still a long way for the industry to go. The average latency on my broadband service, for instance, was 52.26 ms, well above the 40 ms that’s supposed to be the standard level. Even worse, at one point my latency reached 2,586.35ms. That’s high enough to ensure that a VoIP conversation was impossible. Similarly, while average packet loss on my broadband lines was just 0.21% (Century’s Link’s service level standard is a maximum of 0.5%), at one point packet loss on my line spiked at 62.12%. From reports I’ve read about broadband service in general, from both cable and telco, my results aren’t unusual.

I was talking this past week (okay, eMailing) to a former colleague of mine, who worked in the same company as I did for almost a decade. My job there was writing news and features about broadband and telephony. Hers was writing research papers into the business phone switch (i.e. PBX) market. We both left that company within a year of each other, for only slightly different reasons, and are both now still at it, but on a contract basis.

The tale she had to tell is very telling about what’s happening in the market. I’m writing about VoIP (indeed, this blog is one example) and ever faster broadband. She’s earning her living helping traditional phone switch manufacturers cope with the emerging new world of VoIP, doing custom competitive analysis research.

“The traditional phone system market is declining, and the manufacturers are struggling since sales are way down. The growing market is for Hosted PBX,” she said to me. Hosted PBX, or what some might call “virtual PBX.” The bottom line is that what she’s seeing is yet another reflection of the growing trend of businesses of all sizes to move to the type of business phone service offered by carriers such as Phone.com.

Now here I also do make a careful distinction between competitive VoIP carriers. There are several quite well known companies in the market – we all know who they are – that target primarily residential users. But those companies, by their very nature, offer what’s basically an advanced (and less expensive) version of the same type of phone service that home users have long received.

Then there’s another tier of VoIP carriers – which is where Phone.com fits in – that offers an advanced (and less expensive) version of the type of phone service that small to medium size businesses, including the small office-home office (SOHO) users, are accustomed too. Those are the companies that in the past might have purchased a key system or small PBX. But these days a virtual PBX is the answer, providing even a small business with phone service that has features that once were the province of only very large businesses.