VoIP rocked in 2009 and it did for the decade. However, at the beginning of the year, some analysts and bloggers saw that VoIP was in agony and some even declared it dead. Little did they know that the industry would top the decade's best-performing industries list.
In April, Google Voice is launched and while it wasn't primarily an VoIP product, it offered what many communicators were looking for. Later in the year, Google Voice invaded the industry by getting support in many services and devices, including the iPhone, and finally goes VoIP by acquiring Gizmo5.
The much hyped iPhone gained considerable VoIP power throughout 2009, with tremendous support from many VoIP services. First Skype came to the iPhone, which got much opposition from mobile carriers. Despite that, most of the major mobile VoIP services gave support to iPhone users, including Google Voice, Vopium, SIP services, among others. Finally, restrictions imposed by mobile carriers on the use of VoIP over the iPhone were raised.
Skype has known a number of developments; it even faced the danger of disappearance, following a lawsuit from Joltid, but this was finally cleared out near the end of the year. Skype made two moves that were unwelcome by many. After launching the 4.0 version of its application, which many people didn't like, it doubled the price of its international rates to most destinations. Now it has new owners and is in the process of becoming open source.
Elsewhere, without huge events, residential and mobile VoIP services kept consolidating their positions. Ooma launched new hardware, Vonage went mobile, and many mobile services extended support for GSM, Wi-Fi and 3G and to even more handsets and phones. WiMax, which seems interesting and a good auxiliary protocol for VoIP, finally starts to interest certain players in the industry.
