“The problem has always been, there is no real economic benefit to going to IP voice if you don’t have to make a change out for some other reason,” Nissen said. “When the time comes that you have to make a choice, then you’ve got lots of options.”

One of the most viable options for many SMBs are multiservice business gateways, which Nissen believes will grow in popularity. Multiservice systems are not VoIP-exclusive. Rather, they can provide a router, security appliance, VoIP gateway, WiFi capability, intrusion protection software – or any combination of features that the business requires.

“This is also impacting the means by which small businesses will adopt voice-over IP,” Nissen said. “If they have to change out their router for any reason, they will probably deploy a multiservice device, and that will dictate to a certain extent when they move to IP voice. It may not be immediately, but they make that decision because these multiservice devices include voice.”

In addition to cost-cutting pressures, the SMB market has historically been slow to adopt IT technologies in general, focusing instead on business challenges and not introducing new technology challenges. According to Storella, VoIP is one way these enterprises could actually be cutting costs. They can save 30% to 40% by acquiring their equipment and continuing to use PSTN or SIP trunks rather than purchasing high-priced packaged solutions, he said.

“A typical small business that saves $200 a month on its phone bill is super excited to get into the new equipment,” Storella said. “Once they get the equipment, they realize it’s a whole new world of new and better features like improved audio with 722 wideband, but also the backend integration. You can now start to integrate backroom operations like CRM [conditional rights management] programs to your VoIP system.”

Regardless of new features, Nissen pointed out that all In-Stat research has concluded that although voice quality matters, small businesses – much like consumers – are not willing to pay for it. While it’s necessary to have an adequate level of quality, anything above that is not automatically compelling enough to make a change. Adequate, he said, is largely defined by the competition. In the US, where competition is still not too high, snom has an opportunity to compete if it finds the right intersection between quality of service and price. Today, KlarVOICE is available for $32.50 through US resellers as an upgrade to snom’s 3xx series phone.

“If this [722] codec is able to provide high-quality VoIP at a cost-efficient rate, that could easily become the standard, in which case that is going to be adopted across the board, but I don’t see that people will pay extra to get this,” Nissen said. “What they are basically saying is you can have excellent quality and you can accommodate more voice-over IP channels within a given bandwidth, or you can oversubscribe the lines and use less bandwidth and less SIP trunks to accommodate your system – and that is okay. If it is going to save money on SIP trunks, people will do it…It is all related to: Can you eliminate SIP trunks? And if you can, than it pays for itself.”