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.

Word emanating from Waterloo, Onatario, Canada is that the new BlackBerry 10 platform will support VoIP. Over the past couple of days, a flood of both formal statements and leaks indicate that a slew of developers have jumped at the opportunity to build BlackBerry 10 versions of their VoIP applications, either for their own VoIP services or to provide to VoIP carriers who prefer not to devote their resources to basic applications development.

For the tekkies among us, myself included, the development is indeed exciting. But for the business analysts amongst us, myself included, the jury is still out.

It’s no secret that the former Research In Motion (RIM), which has just taken on the name of its premiere product line as its corporate name and renamed itself BlackBerry, is in trouble, its survival hardly assured. Once the absolute leader in smartphones, these days it’s been totally eclipsed by both Apple and Android-based offerings, with Microsoft’s Windows nipping at BlackBerry’s heels. Some really good analysts I’ve been reading are even suggesting that Android will soon displace Apple, with Windows Phone to also pass both BlackBery and Apple, with BlackBerry relegated to last place.

Given that scenario, BlackBerry’s best chance at survival is to take a gamble, and part of that gamble is on VoIP. To that end, BlackBerry has now validated PJSIP, which is an open source embedded SIP protocol stack written in C. In short, PJSIP is a way to port a VoIP application to various platforms, and a couple of weeks ago the developer community behind PJSIP (see www.pjsip.org) released instructions on how to port to BlackBerry 10. The task can be done in a phenomenally short 10 minutes. After that, it’s up to the developer to tinker with his application to make it work properly on PJSIP running on the BlackBerry 10 platform. From what I’ve been reading, the task is not difficult.

The result may be that the new BlackBerry 10-based phones, which to no surprise support Long Term Evolution (LTE), are the first that will soon work as VoIP phones over just about anybody’s VoIP service. Will that be enough to save BlackBerry? Or will the leader get another arrow in its back? Only time, and the marketplace, will tell.

So what does that mean to users of a VoIP provider such as Phone.com?

That’s an obvious answer. It means that in the near future the BlackBerry 10 phones will be, as I’ve been predicting for a long time, usable as VoIP extensions on a company’s virtual PBX. In other words, the conversations will flow over wireless data channels, rather than over current cellular voice channels, and the VoIP calls will be both incoming and outgoing. Indeed a very small business might even use a cell phone as its main business phone.

Meanwhile, as we wait for this to happen, I should note that Phone.com users can easily set up any wireless or landline phone, or a PC, anywhere in the world, as an incoming extension to their virtual switchboard. (The PC can also be an outgoing VoIP extension, using Phone.com’s Communicator software http://www.phone.com/features/communicator.php.)

Finally, while BlackBerry may be the first to open up its platform to VoIP developers, the way industry works there’s little doubt that others will play follow the leader. While there are some VoIP kluges for Android, I think it’s inevitable that Google won’t let BlackBerry get ahead on this one. And the folks at Microsoft and Apple aren’t dumb or the companies wouldn’t be where they are … they’re sure to follow suit once they realize they’re losing business by not supporting VoIP.

Yet another clear indication that VoIP will soon be carried over 4G wireless, i.e.  LTE (Long Term Evolution) emerged a couple of weeks ago at the Citi Global Internet, Media & Telecommunications Conference.

At that conference AT&T’s senior EVP of AT&T technology and network operations, John Donovan, made it crystal clear that part of AT&T’s broadband delivery plans include LTE, mostly in rural areas, rather than wired broadband service.

“We anticipate that LTE will be our broadband coverage solution for a portion of the country, we just haven’t yet gotten to the point where we’ve got enough experience under our belt to know what the portion will be,” Donovan said. “There’s no question that as we extend ourselves from 75 percent of the footprint to 99 percent of the footprint in our region that we’re going to be using LTE for some of that broadband.” (For those who would like to hear Donovan’s entire presentation, it’s at: http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=113088&p=irol-EventDetails&EventId=4887032

What the means, of course, is that businesses in America’s rural areas who opt for VoIP services such as Phone.com will be getting another broadband option for delivery of Internet phone service. Indeed for some it may be their first high speed broadband option, which means a fertile new market for both business and residential VoIP carriers.

 I’ve blogged about what I see as the relation between VoIP and LTE often, so it is gratifying to see my predictions come a step closer to reality. One thing I should mention on the technical side is that VoIP over LTE (or VoLTE) used to deliver broadband to a fixed location is significantly easier than VoIP over an LTE-capable cell phone. That’s because VoLTE for a phone needs to accommodate hand-off as the user moves from one place to another, an issue that doesn’t arise with a fixed location.

I see that the latest buzz in the VoIP world is a report by research house IBISWorld on the state of the VoIP industry as of the end of last year. IBISWorld revealed only a small fraction of its findings – one has to buy the full report to learn them all. That, of course, is totally reasonable given the nature of their business.

But even the small bits they did reveal were just sooo tantalizing.

VoIP, they estimate, is now an industry with $15 billion in annual revenue. Its annual growth rate from 2007-20012 was 16.7%. They also estimate that there are 35,164 people employed in the VoILP industry, working at some 860 companies.

Phone.com, for whom I’m blogging, is obviously one of those 860. The biggest share of the loot, though, is in residential VoIP, rather than in the arena of business VoIP. Cable companies, for instance, gobble up some 65% of the VoIP lines … mostly residential accounts.

That, to me, is hardly a surprise since the traditional “telephone” companies are still desperately trying to protect their legacy phone business, whereas the cable companies have nothing to lose by venturing into VoIP and grabbing customers from those millions who already watch the TV shows they deliver.

So where does all of this leave business VoIP? Says IBISWorld, “Businesses will slowly but surely turn to VoIP for voice needs.” And that’s where specialists come in … VoIP providers whose forte is providing the type of services that businesses need, such as virtual switchboards, calling queues that are not only easily established but also easily changed, and remote extension anywhere in the world with the flexibility to transparently change their location in an instant.

IBISWorld also warns that wildcards, such as Google Voice, could easily change to VoIP landscape. But when I look around at projects such as Google Voice, Skype, MagicJ, OOma and a plethora of other free or near-free VoIP efforts, I don’t see a lot of medium or long term danger to real business VoIP providers. Indeed I’ve had more than one small business friend tell me about how cheap his phone service is, only to not long after bemoan his loss of a business deal or two because such service just isn’t the right thing for a business. His illusory savings were more than wiped out by his lost business.

Lesson learned. In the long run, you get what you pay for, and in VoIP that means a provider such as Phone.com who cares about the needs of business, and provides both the infrastructure and customer service that a business needs … to do its business.