Disruptive technology example: Voice over Internet Protocol, VoIP, business phone service
VoIP=voice over internet. Disruptive technology/innovation=new, ground-breaking product/service on a large scale.
Examples of disruptive innovations are the personal computer, the laptop, mobile phones, emails, online courses, and massive open online courses, MOOC. They all interfered with a product/service to make something new accessible through a disruptive process.
Sometimes, you will experience disruptive technologies or innovations, and VoIP has been such an experience for me and many others. VoIP was introduced during the 1990s and became available to the masses in the first decade of the 21st century, at least where I live in Sweden. In 2014, when my employer decided to change the business phone solution, and it was time to toss out my old work phone, I captured the moment as a memento of an era gone by.
The old way of telephone communication was known as the public switched telephone network, PSTN, also called plain old telephone service, POTS. The calls were switched back and forth between electrical circuits, and, in a sense, there was always a nonstop, physical electronic connection between the caller and the person that answered the telephone call. You can picture it as an uninterrupted copper wire, with signals going back and forth continuously. The difference is that internet telephony, from a technical point of view, is not a continuous electronic connection, and signals are not sent and received in a continuous flow. Rather, our voices are cut into pieces of digital data and sent as packets over the internet.
A business firm, a university, or any other organization can run its telephone system over its standard internet connection, even a simple broadband connection. Daily, we use internet broadband for e-mail and web surfing. VoIP is just another service running over the internet broadband.
There are many benefits of VoIP. There are usually no costs for calls between two VoIP phones, which makes long-distance calls less of a budget burden. Moving a VoIP phone to another room or a new location is easy. Unplug and move it as long as you can access the internet.
With the old technology, you had to pay extra for moving or adding a phone, if it was possible. VoIP calls can also be made in different ways, which makes it even more flexible.
You can keep and use your old, traditional phone and adapters to hook into the internet and the VoIP systems. Or you can use special VoIP phones made for using the VoIP systems. You can use software on an ordinary computer to make calls via your PC or Mac. You can even have a VoIP app on your mobile phone. You are not limited by the number of copper wires that run into your business office. You need one internet connection and are limited by its capacity, i.e., bandwidth. You do not need to pay for and install a new copper wire each time you add a phone to your office as long as your internet connection can handle the calls. Another benefit is that VoIP is fully compatible with how the internet is set up and operates, which is great for business phone systems.
VoIP works with existing applications such as e-mail, web surfing, and customer databases. Your VoIP server can take messages, and you can also send instant messages via your VoIP server. This is the big benefit of VoIP: telephones and computers used to be more or less separated, but they now live in the same world, resulting in tons of benefits for firms, authorities, organizations, and individuals.
In my example, the hardware is my computer and headphones, and the software is Microsoft Lync, a fairly common program for business phone solutions. It is not the only way of using IP telephony, but this type of softphone is the business solution that my employer has chosen. A softphone is a software you install on your PC or Mac to enable your computer to act as a telephone.
Suggested reading
Clayton Christensen’s book and his website.
Dennis Viehland's articles on disruptive innovations in the educational field.
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Copyright
Text, video, and audio © Kent Löfgren, Sweden
Photos by the following flickr.com members have been used with permission under CC BY-SA: zigazou76 (00:50), olpc (00:56), waagsociety (00:57), mwichary (01:06), kruemi (01:09), dvanzuijlekom (01:13), fsse-info (02:47), glenbledsoe (03:14), and kim_carpenter_nj (03:40).
